A sunrise postponed

(CLARIFICATION, 10/24/2005: I am neither stating nor implying that Chloe's opinions on this matter are the same as Chris Pirillo's. Go here to see Chloe's entry on this matter. It was only because of a link on Chloe's site that I even became aware of Chris Pirillo's anti-Blogspot diatribe. I am not responsible for how people choose to interpret things I didn't say.)

I was visiting Chloe's Watermelon Punch this morning, checking on the status of a comment I had posted last night regarding Chris Pirillo's call for Google to get rid of Blogspot and all the blogs that are on it - 99% of which, he maintains, are fake blogs, or "splogs".

Now, I've never heard of Chris Pirillo, but that may put me in some sort of minority. I am not a propellerhead, someone deeply and passionately enamored with the technical aspects of computers, the internet, and the online experience. I'm just this guy, just another monkey with a blog. A Google search for "anothermonkey.blogspot" will yield 281 results. A search for "pirillo" will yield 1,670,000 results, for "chris pirillo" will give 1,420,000 hits, and for his website "lockergnome", 1,930,000. (He claims he had no idea these sites were so popular. Perhaps he should try Googling himself once in a while?) So this guy's out there, but I've never heard of him.

His call for Blogspot eradication - which he later tries to pass off as a "Modest Proposal", though it sounds more like a bit of technobullying than a piece of Swiftean satire - focuses on a problem I've discussed before: the preponderance of fake blogs. His first approximation solution is to simply eliminate all Blogspot blogs. He maintains that only 1% of all Blogspot blogs are "legitimate". I'm not sure what his criteria for "legitimacy" are; I count blogs written in Portuguese and Farsi and Chinese and whatever the hell language 12-year-olds speak these days* to be "legitimate", even if I have no idea what they're about. By my observations made during recent "Next Blog" walks, the proportion of "legitimate" to "fake" Blogspot blogs is closer to 80/20 - perhaps even 90/10, which is a hell of a lot better than it was just a few months ago.

I don't want to get into this just now. It's a lengthy debate, and it gets into the concept of blog-snobbery. I'm finding out that Blogspot is considered the blogging ghetto. Well, welcome to the jungle, baby.

Anyway. I was on Chloe's site this morning, and I saw that my comment had finally been posted (it had been quarantined after I submitted it last night, possibly because my URL had a ".blogspot" extension), and Chloe had posted a response to it, when I noticed an orange-pink glow behind me and over my left shoulder. I jumped up, grabbed my camera, ran outside, and took some pictures of the sunrise.

Unfortunately, Chloe's website (which is not a Blogspot blog) is a little feature-heavy - which means that not only does it take up to five minutes to load onto my poor little computer over my dialup connection, but also that each of its features leaves little pieces of itself behind after I leave, eating up a little bit of my resources. The upshot of which is that after visiting her site, and Chris Pirillo's site, and a few others this morning, it was not possible for me to post my pictures of this beautiful sunrise before I had to start getting ready for work.

So you'll have to wait until I get back home tonight. Sorry!

*Update 10/20/05 9:51 PM: I've just spent about an hour walking through Blogspot blogs using the "Next Blog" button. I've been through about 100 blogs, and I've found about seven in Portuguese, one in Chinese (from Taiwan), none in Farsi (though I have seen at least one in the past) and none by twelve-year-olds speaking their own incoherent language (the closest I came was a semi-coherent one from a sixteen-year-old.) And I've found and flagged only three fake blogs. So Mr. Pirillo's estimate of "1% legitimate" is full of crap. He can use either the hyperbole defense - "Hey, you're not supposed to take this seriously!" - in which case the validity of any of his other statements on his site (and he makes quite a few of them, and apparently considers his statements to be Very Important and Quite Authoritative) is called into question. Or he can simply argue that his definition of "legitimate" doesn't include people writing about their pet iguanas, their theories of comparing politics to Yu-Gi-Oh playing styles, their experiences during basic training, their churches, their kids, their problems paying the rent, the books they read, the movies they watch, the jobs they do. 'Cause those are all things I came across during my walk through the Blogspot ghetto. You know what? I think I'll stick around.