Meta-blogging: the act of blogging about blogging.

I used to hate meta-blogging. Most meta-blogging happens in the form of some kid saying ‘Wow, I haven’t updated in a while….’ or something to that extent. News flash: if you haven’t updated in a while then either (A) I didn’t notice and don’t care or (B) I am an avid reader of your blog and am greatly irked by the fact that you haven’t posted in a while. In that case I would rather you post something interesting and worth reading, not restate the obvious. Yes, your posts are timestamped…. if I wanted to know, I could check how long it was since your last post.

Yes, attentive reader, you point out that I’ve been guilty of this a few times. ‘Look world, I just coded a better content-management system!’ I’m the only one who remotely cares/notices. Or the obvious ‘Hey, now there are themes’…. Yes, anybody could look around the site and see that.

But there’s an interesting side of metablogging that I am beginning to appreciate. That is the more generalized metablogging. Andrew Sullivan has a piece on why blogging is important: it’s the Napster of journalism, the ultimate peer-to-peer idea-sharing. Still more interesting to me is Hossein Derakhshan’s post about the creation of a specific blogging community. He outlines what such a community needs to start.

I’ve thought a bit about this myself. There are loads of Biola students who blog, and they sort of loosely have mutual readership, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be helpful to have a centralized place where the Biola web community could come together. Centralized linkage would help bring people together too; there’s no one place where you can find them all. There also could be some interesting discussions on different blogging software or sites that help. Who knows….

Just another of my crazy thoughts. I have many of them, most of which amount to nothing.