Blogging: Now 50% more banal!

Slashdot has a forum posted today about the rise and fall of blogs including a link to Blogging Burnout which argues that banality and mass production are destroying the blogosphere. Just hit the "next blog" feature of the Blogspot toolbar and you'll probably see what I mean.

I think that the real objection here is that blogging is becoming progressively less trendy with time amongst the avant-garde now that the inevitable cultural counterattack has been triggered. Welcome to the modern era.

But obviously the American people are also being grossly underestimated in this analysis. The average American simply has a much greater tolerance for banality than Blogging Burnout assumes. We live in a country where broadcast journalism can make enormous profits whenever it replaces serious news with an endlessly replayed snippet of juicy security camera footage. Our nation's political leaders have built careers, lifestyles, and in some cases personalities around projecting an aura of total blandness to the public. Spam and pop-up ads wouldn't exist if there wasn't someone, somewhere, who was made better off by a timely reminder that, yes, viagra can improve the quality of your erection.