Why Blogs Are Useless

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»Why Blogs Are Useless

I really wanted to show everyone why blogs should not be used as real news. <a href="http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9780985-7.html">Here's a good example</a>. News.com starting blogging about a year ago and they used to label the blogs in their RSS feed... not anymore. All of the stories now are pretty much crappy blog stories...

Let's take some content...

Will free office suites supplant Microsoft as the industry leader?

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Quite a bit of talk has arisen today over two of Microsoft's competitors (Google and IBM) offering free office suites in an attempt to supplant Microsoft as the office king. And now that this is happened, some are wondering if Microsoft will finally face reality and offer its own Office product for free so it can compete.

The possibility of having Word, Excel, Powerpoint and the rest for free sure sounds awfully nice, but if you think Microsoft would give it up for free, you're dreaming.

As NPD announced just last week, Office 2007 is performing extremely well. According to the research firm, Office 2007 on Windows is selling at roughly double the rate of Office 2003. Will two free solutions alter the unprecedented sales figures Microsoft is currently enjoying? Not a chance.

So that sounds fairly well off, right? Nope. First of all, Google's so-called office suite is only online and doesn't really compete with MS Office. The second is that IBM isn't offering Open Office... Open Office is open source and 'offered' by Sun! But in reality, it is offered by anyone willing to compile the source.

Let's move on...

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As someone who has used both Google's Office Suite and another free product, OpenOffice, I can say that neither of those programs can possibly stack up to Windows Office. Believe me, I wish I could say that both do, but the sad truth is they don't.

Sorry, most reasonably technical people know the difference between Windows and MS Office. This is where I stopped reading. But I continued again...

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For example, try to do everything you can in Excel on a free Office solution and I'll guarantee you'll be back to Redmond in no time. Regardless of where your loyalties lie, it's impossible to compare these free products with Office -- the support is horrible, the interface is a bit clunky and all of them are underpowered. In fact, OpenOffice is better-equipped to compete with Office 97 than Office 2007.

That's a pretty good lie. OpenOffice Calc does everything that Excel does. I've used it and still do. Calc has different functions and such, but it is feature complete. This is a good example of someone not bothering to learn anything different.

More...

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Sad as it is, we're cultivating an Office software market that is utterly dominated by one company. And whether or not we like it, the business world runs on Office.

Now go pay too much money for a $50 software suite. Trust me, you'll like it.

Most people don't like paying for MS Office and usually get it from someone else. Yes, they perform infringement. If Microsoft clamped down on those, you'll see the free solutions really sky rocket.

Please add your comments below.

Dude, you're not doing your post subject justice. I mean, ideally that would be a subject about a disquisition on blogs with a negative conclusion ;-) (I didn't expect it, but this ? Citing one article published under the word "blog" and proving it's bullshit ?)

some 90% or more of blogs are not interesting to or even targeted at the general public. Of the rest, a similar fraction is lousy. That doesn't mean blogs are useless. Also, about 99.997% of YouTube content is crap, but still, there is good stuff on YouTube and YouTube is not useless IMHO.

I can expand upon it... but there isn't a need too. We can cite multiple examples here in the comments. Go for it.

(the following quotes are from from chapter two/pgs. 41-43 of "Free Culture", ISBN 0-14-303465-0)

Said By Lawrence Lessig

(...) But there are many who use the space to engage in public discourse. Discussing matters of public import, criticizing politicians about the decisions they make, offering solutions to problems we all see: blogs create a virtual public meeting (...)

That is a good point of blogs. Fora can also be used for discussion, but the blogosphere is one large very decentralized network, the writers are more independent and have more control. Also, it's possible to follow select blogs with RSS feeds, which checking one huge or many tiny fora isn't as convenient.

Said By Lessig

One direct effect is on stories that had a different life cycle in the mainstream media. The Trent Lott affair is an example. When Lott "misspoke" at a party for Senator Strom Thurmond, essentially praising Thurmond's segregationist policies, he calculated correctly that this story would disappear from the mainstream press within forty-eight hours. It did. But he didn't calculate its life cycle in blog space. The bloggers kept researching the story. Over time, more and more instances of the same "misspeaking" emerged. Finally, the story broke back into mainstream press. In the end, Lott was forced to resign as senate majority leader. [1]

The point made here is simple: blogs add an increased degree of democracy to journalism. The World Wide Web, as such, makes this already possible without blog form, but having this kind of norm makes it easier to create a web outlet and to follow a number of others' writings. Don't misunderstand "democracy", though:

Said By Lessig

But democracy has never just been about elections. Democracy means rule by the people, but rule means something more than mere elections. In our [US-American] tradition, it also means comtrol through reasoned discourse. (...) It wasn't popular elections that fascinated him — it was the jury, an institution that gave ordinary people the right to choose life or death for other citizens.

I don't read blogs, especially the relevant type, a lot. However, I occasionally read http://www.bildblog.de/ , a (German) blog that points out mistakes, exaggerations, one-sided reports, omissions etc. in the most popular paper in Europe, the (lousy) German tabloid "Bild". Would the author have started this important and high-quality site if there were no weblogging software, if the blogging trend didn't exist ? I doubt it. Would people read it (and contributed) if he had ? I dare say I believe a lot less would.

If you say that all "${NewsAgency}Blog"-type publications are useless, that may well be correct.

[1]: Lessig refers to: Noah Shachtman, "With Incessant Postings, a Pundit Stirs the Pot," New York Times, 16 January 2003, G5.