It seems my personal blog is the subject of some sort of school assignment:

“The first blog I went to was a vanity blog about a guy named Jason. He lives in Canada with his wife. He had recently gone to an amusement park and had pictures of him and his friends in go-carts. They were cute! Ironically he is a technology geek so that was funny in the fact that I am just the opposite and know very little. He talked about what he installed on his computer lately, about burning CD’s and his camera.”

The author, a woman named Terry who’s a mother and attending a school called COC (possibly College of the Canyons?), seemed to have an assignment about writing regarding two different types of blogs. “Vanity” blogs and “information” blogs. Her conclusion is that “information blogs” are better because they contain useful information, while vanity blogs are less useful because she has no desire to read about someone else’s life. While I can’t argue with the basic conclusion, the point that Terri is missing is that all blogs, even the so-called “vanity blogs”, contain information that’s useful to someone, somewhere.

[As a side note, I find this whole thing highly amusing because when I was teaching a class about online communications at Mount Royal College for two semesters, I had my students use Blogger to do little assignments like this...and here I am the subject of one!]

While I know there are blogs out there that are 100% pure vanity blogs (”This morning I had orange juice to drink. It was orange.”), most blogs contain more than that. It might be about an experience they had with a certain product that was awful, a band they went to see play that sucked, a CD they bought that they thought that was great, a store they went into that has a great sale…all of those things are information. Are they usable to the general public? No way - most people aren’t going to read a personal blog unless they know the person in some way, or unless they truly find that person fascinating. But that’s where the magic of search engines come in - they slurp up all the information they can, which is why no matter how obscure the information you’re looking for is, odds are good that someone, somewhere, has written something about it. (more…)