Attack of the Newbie Bloggers
Published March 31st, 2009 | 
I’m sitting at the library tapping my fingers on the keyboard of my laptop as I normally do at least a few times a week. In the area behind me, separated by a divider, there’s a class going on. It’s a class on how to blog using wordpress. I’m listening to this class — the questions being asked by the students (many of them working class people who are not only new to blogging, but are relatively inexperienced with the Internet in general) and the instructor’s answers. According to the last estimate, I read, there are something like 250,000,000+ blogs currently online globally with about 175,000+ new blogs being created every day. I’m not exactly a math whiz (and correct me if I’m wrong), but that means that nearly 3 blogs are being created every minute of the day. Wow! That’s an astounding number. That means that while I’ve been writing this something like 6 or 7 new blogs have come into being and that at least a couple more will arrive on the scene by the time I key-in the last period of the last sentence in this post.
(Wait a second I have to go off-topic here and interrupt the flow to comment on something the instructor just told his class that is stupid and wrong: The instructor just told the class that “open source software is free and not protected by copyright.” Not true, dipshit. Open source just means that the code of the software has a license to be freely modified by other programmers. That doesn’t mean that software created from that source code can’t be sold commercially or that the code isn’t protected by copyright.)
Getting back to my original point, there are increasing numbers of people joining the blogosphere every day — regular people who mostly don’t have a damn clue about what they are doing and aren’t professional writers. That’s not necessarily a bad thing because some of them will improve or discover they don’t like doing it and hit a wall and quit thus sparing us from their mediocre blog one way or another. And, even if you are not a terribly good writer, writing still has it’s own rewards. Unfortunately, you also have people posting illegal podcasts, plagiarizing, infringing on copyrights, etc. Some know better but do it anyway because they figure they can get away with it, but most do it because they don’t know the difference. (And with guys like the erstwhile instructor confusing open source with copyright-free, it’s no wonder) until one day they end up getting sued. Ignorance breeds ignorance. On the other hand, with so much ignorance being spread around, there is a need for bloggers like me to blog about it. So kudos to ignorant newbies for giving me something to write about.
2 Responses to Attack of the Newbie Bloggers
So, did you take the time to enlighten that instructor? Wait til class was over so as not to embarrass him, and quietly tip him off? If not, there’s not much point in posting about the general state of ignorance.
Of course not. I’m not being paid to teach that class and I’m not getting paid to educate the instructor so I felt no great impetus to do more than comment on the event. Besides, even if I thought to do that, the guy ducked out fairly quickly after class end and I had already moved onto something else. I will concede that there’s not that much of a point to my blog post, however, as it is my blog, I reserve the right to be pointless.