The Tail That Wags the Blog

The Tail That Wags the Blog: "The Tail That Wags the Blog
They behave like fun-loving slackers, but they're secretly staging a coup

By Joel Achenbach

Sunday, August 21, 2005; Page W13

I constantly tell myself: Ignore the blog. Do your work. You are an enormous literary figure and cultural icon, not a mere 'blogger.' You must produce high-end journalism with grand themes and huge groaning multi-syllabic words like 'eschatological,' and you can't be dribbling away all your ideas on the blog. Be strong! Resist the blog!

And then . . . I hear it yowling.

Rough Draft
(Richard Thompson)

The blog is hungry. The blog will not be ignored. It is an insatiable little beast, a creature still unclassified by science -- hairy, warty, slobbering, with its own fiendish agenda. I often fantasize about killing the blog, but I worry that it will respond just like the crazed computer in '2001: A Space Odyssey': It will try to kill me first.

The blog originated in January as a catch basin for mental detritus, for the kind of stuff not good enough for print, but too good to waste on casual conversation or, worse, mere thinking. But this spring I began allowing 'comments,' and the blog suddenly mutated. America, it turns out, is full of smart, clever, creative people who happen to have no interest in working and whose employers have unwisely given them Internet access. Thus every day, on my blog, these strangers show up, just to shoot the breeze, flirt, kvetch, veer off topic and, most of all, pay zero attention to what I have written.

Let's cut to the chase: The blog ignores me.

I am constantly having to post something new just to make the blog interested in me again. My contribution to the blog is what I call the 'Kit.' The commenters' part is called the 'Kaboodle.' Some of the everyday Kaboodlers make references to 'our blog,' as though they're co-proprietors. It's obvious at this point that the Kaboodle is trying to take o"

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