By Mario
Jun, 1st 2009 02:11 PM (14:11)

Blog is short for web log (just like captains log in Star Trek but with dates we can actually understand). These are logs that people release to the public over the Internet, often using some free blogging service. Blogs can be quite useful and interesting. Most of them are, however, annoying and time consuming.

To better explain, I’ll start with introducing a few types of blog.

1.    Useful blogs that actually have something to offer to the reader.

a)    Expert blogs – Written by people who are experts in (or at least have significant knowledge of) their field  of interest. Such blogs can be really helpful to the person reading it, especially if the person has similar interests.
b)    Company blogs – Written by PR’s of companies. This is how companies advertise their products these days.
c)    Anything useful to the person reading it.

2.    The majority of blogs out there. Completely annoying and of no value to the person reading it.
a)    Emo crap – As the name implies, written by emo’s who just rant about how the world is unfair to them and how no one understands them. What is actually interesting is that these blogs prove that the stereotype about emos is actually true (at least to some point, I’ve never bothered to find out).

Designs of these blogs are usually quite dark, often with red letters, and even more often have huge grayscale banners with images of converse shoes, hearts, red roses or blood.
b)    Teenage girl/boy (more often a girl than a boy) – Random two word rants about daily events intermixed with a huge number of smileys, dots and words like “LOLOOL”.  It wouldn’t be that bad if they actually tried to use grammar and proper spelling.

The layout often uses a mix of eye hurting colors along with flashing animations that often break up the layout. It is not uncommon to be startled by loud music coming from a player hidden somewhere on the page in this load of junks. It’s not uncommon to have multiple songs start playing at the same time.

The boxes are filled with lists of likes/dislikes, images and info like full name, address, school, emails, mobile numbers, exact geological coordinates and stuff that really comes useful to stalkers and sexual predators.

c)    Useless crap about life – People who have nothing better to than to talk about what happened to them today. They seriously think that we actually care about as if we didn’t have problems of our own. Only visited by friends who are forced to visit, by bots and by idiots who post comments “nice post, check out my blog” or “hey, want some free porn?” 

As someone once pointed out that I lack a dose of self-criticism, I’ll mention that this article may remotely fall into this category.

d)    One time posters who inform us that they will be writing a blog, never to come back.

e)    Idiots who run javascript alerts when the page loads. These are especially annoying since I have to click trough multiple alert boxes that say “HI, my name is <insert name here>; Welcome to my blog; please leave comments”.

Blogs are not bad. While surfing the Net I found many interesting and useful blogs out there. The problem is that, like every other thing known to mankind that is freely accessible to a large number of idiots, blogs are abused, mostly unknowingly.