NBR dignoses compulsive comment disorder

An article in today’s NBR talks about blogs. Some of the amusing quotes are below, and the full article over the break for those interested (hoping NBR won’t object to the publicity)

Stumbling across David Farrar’s blog on Monday, Scribbler was stunned by the amount of writing he had done and the range of subjects he had covered over the weekend.

I type fast and think faster 🙂

Reading it, though, was rather like watching television news in the company of someone suffering from compulsive comment disorder.

Ha. Try going to a movie with me.

Nothing crosses Farrar’s borders without getting a thorough going over. Foolish attempts to smuggle politically correct or even vaguely leftish opinions are exposed under his relentless scrutiny and paraded for all to see.

I think that is the nicest thing said about me yet in NBR!

While you and I were out and about enjoying the sunniest Easter weekend in living memory, they [me and Russell] stayed inside huddled over their keyboards, blogging flat out to keep their output of commentary, opinion and insight up to the speed of incoming commentary, opinion and insight on their screens.

Actually if they had read my blog closer they would have discovered I spent Good Friday up north with friends, having an outdoor lunch and wine. I spent Easter Saturday in Featherston playing with siege engines, Saturday evening out partying until 2 am, and Easter Day, went driving with new found friends around Wellington scenic spots, and then dinner with them.

So my 30 posts over Easter did not deprive me of enjoying the sun. I had a great time. I just blogged when most people are sleeping!

Blogs: Dim pinpricks of light or compulsive comment disorder?
The National Business Review – 13 April 2007

If a picture is worth a thousand words, one reporter is worth a million bloggers. Make that 70 million, the estimated blog population in Saturday’s paper and not counting the 600,000 new blogs created since then, or the 80 that will spring into life in the minute or so you spend on reading this scribble.

Think of blogs as stars in the Milky Way, each one pulsing with suppressed opinions, insights and observations but too far away to ever be more just dim pinpricks of light.

Some stars, however, shine brighter than others. The blogs of Russell Brown and David Farrar are clearly visible in orbit round their navels at any time of the day or night.

While you and I were out and about enjoying the sunniest Easter weekend in living memory, they stayed inside huddled over their keyboards, blogging flat out to keep their output of commentary, opinion and insight up to the speed of incoming commentary, opinion and insight on their screens.

Stumbling across David Farrar’s blog on Monday, Scribbler was stunned by the amount of writing he had done and the range of subjects he had covered over the weekend.

Reading it, though, was rather like watching television news in the company of someone suffering from compulsive comment disorder.

Nothing crosses Farrer’s borders without getting a thorough going over. Foolish attempts to smuggle politically correct or even vaguely leftish opinions are exposed under his relentless scrutiny and paraded for all to see.

He’s a political anorak and, while standing guard on the other side of the border, Brown is also a nerd’s nerd with a trainspotter’s eye for detail.

He can discern when a concert performed by the Auckland Philharmonia which might take two days to download over a dial-up connection has been LAME-encoded at 32MHz and 192 Kbit/sec.

Not all blogs are on the internet. One that would be too long to read on a screen was published this week. By Ian Wishart (#1 Bestselling Author), it looks like a book but is actually a blog.

Without giving away too much of the plot, which wanders off almost straight away and gets lost in dense bullshit until miraculously rediscovered hiding in the index, Wishart’s latest conspiracy outing involves homosexual atheists, atheistic homosexualists and Islamofascists in a plot to bring down western civilisation.

If this book had armpits it would sweat. Open it anywhere and cop a blast of paranoia’s acrid whiff. That’s one reason why it’s more like a blog than a book.

Another is it shares the blog’s main limitation – countering opinion with opinion, dis belief with dat belief, your meat, my poison. It’s the blogger’s charter: Brown on Farrar, Farrar on Brown, tit for tat, this and that; reflections in a hall of mental mirrors leading nowhere.

Wishart also has the blogger’s confidence in being the first to stumble across insights and linkages previously hidden or, in Mr Wishart’s conspiracy, deliberately concealed.

Out in the real world, however, everyone knows the real threat lies not in homosexualist atheists, Islamofascists or even Botswana-based psychodyke cryptolezzie cabals and their local operative Steve Maharey. It is not Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda that we should fear.

A far greater threat to our way of life comes from an even more insidious conspiracy between Bill Gates and Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch and FoxNews.