Short Posts and World Domination

I subscribed to The Blog Herald feed in the vague hope that it would contain news of bloggery. Probably it does, but it is among the worst written and most insanely prolix publications I have ever encountered so I haven't been able to find out. I did, however, make it to the end of this lugubrious piece protesting about the use of the word 'user' when applied, in particular, to bloggers. 'User' implies passive consumption whereas bloggers are both publishers and audience. The writer - I use the term loosely - is saying something similar to commenter Car Geye in my previous post. As CG puts it, 'The citizen journalist is the best hope for world peace.' Microsoft seems to agree that bloggers are, at least, powerful. Along with chip maker AMD, it has sent out Acer Ferrari laptops as gifts to some of the most influential bloggers, presumably to promote Vista. Mine, I am sure, is held up in the post. This gesture acknowledges blogger power, but it is also an attempt to control that power by drawing it into the existing structures. Bloggers, therefore, beware. The ability to accept a bribe is a dangerous, though accurate, definition of power. The truth is that the claims for the power of bloggery are not wrong, they are simply premature. Many things can yet go wrong with the blog world domination project, one of which, as The Blog Herald proves, is the issuing of any posts that are significantly longer than this.