Blogging Off Daily...

Tom Scocca's article made me laugh, but blogging can, apparently make me blind. Favorite exerpts below:

TomScocca.com: Blogging Off Daily Can Make You Blind: "Maybe the way to do a blog story is to do a gimmick. Better yet, a really trite-seeming gimmick. It will be, like, meta: The triteness is a commentary on the triteness! Turtles all the way down!"
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Blogging is more spontaneous than regular writing, but it’s writing nonetheless—as opposed to spontaneous blathering on cable TV, he said: "Blogging, by contrast, I think …. " (Here my notes, in my hasty scrawl, appear to say "CRIDLY OCITHS") " … takes us back to a more considered but spontaneous" form of expression.
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The whole instant-commentary business isn’t as new as it looks. When I heard all the excitement over the fact that the bloggers were coming to the political conventions, I got out an anthology of H.L. Mencken’s newspaper writing. There it was: sharp, subjective, blow-by-blow commentary, written on the fly in 1924—1928—1932—1936 ….

"People like Mencken wrote in takes," said Terry Teachout, who wrote a Mencken biography. "I think that Mencken himself might have been quite fascinated [by blogging]."