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A Blogger’s Manifesto

By so many, to so few

by Eric Ringmar
Anthem Press, 148pp, ££8.99, ISBN 9781843312888
Buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

Christopher Howse

Wednesday, 9th January 2008

Christopher Howse reviews a selection of books on the internet

Although bloggers are hypnotised into an almost erotic relationship with their own blogs, technically there is nothing about blogs that makes bloggers foolish, repellent and egotistical. Blogs merely allow us to read their pitiful outpourings, if we want to, which on the whole we do not. Blogging is like modern poetry, more people write it than want to read it. The world had 70 million bloggers last April, and the number may have doubled since then. Britain now has four million bloggers. Most blogs are read by fewer than 10 people a day. Only 10 per cent have more than 100 hits a day. You’d reach a wider audience if you photocopied a few sheets of paper and left them on the Underground.

Yet some blogs, like some poems, reach many thousands. It helps to find a niche and say something expert. In The Bookaholics’ Guide to Book Blogs, two people from the publishers Marion Boyars explain why blogs have influence on book buyers, and thus on publishers. It boils down to bloggers’ resemblance to columnists and critics in weekly publications: the good ones gain a following. Already publishers are sending review copies to some bloggers.

There is a sort of irony in so many books coming out about the internet, which is the medium expected to destroy them. Certainly when a light, eye-friendly electronic reading screen is cheaply available, books and newspapers will really be challenged. But we must bear in mind that it will cost money in future to retrieve information online, and that there is also a danger of someone (commercially or politically) cutting off supplies.

The connections between popular music and the internet are the lianas upon which David Jennings swings through the cyber jungle in Net, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll. Since music is widely consumed online, often coupled with video, the internet seems more hospitable to it than to written news and literature. Jennings is far more optimistic than commentators like Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture and Assaulting our Economy), who argued earlier this year that music online means idiocy, degradation and solipsism.

Jennings, a full-time creature of the net, does not deny the popular delusions and madness of crowds that give some music releases undeserved success, but he comes up on page 64 with a practicable scheme for aggregating trusted criticism that should make him money, if someone takes him up on it.

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