There's been an amusing ongoing flame recently directed by the acerbic Andrew Orlowski of The Register at the mighty Google. Orlowski scores some points, but his take on the relationship between bloggers and their audience is backwards, he's missing the parallel with poets and their audience.
In an April 10 piece, Orlowski rants:
Pew Research described the number of Internet users who read “weblogs” as “statistically insignificant”. The number who write them is much lower.
I disagree; I think blogging is like poetry; the number who write the stuff probably exceeds the number who read it.
For years I wrote poetry too, but now I only steal it. Here are some verses I stole from CNN back in 1997, describing a riot in Northern Ireland:
Some of their supporters,
incensed by the retreat,
hurled cameramen's ladders
and chased others down the street.
