Back in the primordial mist of self-indulgent web-publishing, blogs were a sort of anonymous, online journal, where someone could write their terrible secrets, post their gruesome thoughts, rant about their hatreds, gush about their crushes, wax vitriolic about their employers, politicians and auto-mechanics.

Somewhere along the way, a very clever person (we have no proof they were really a person – it might have been a pixie, nixie, sprite, faerie, gremlin, goblin, bugbear or imp) figured out that Google rates web-sites on content, relevance and authority.

Then, as if over night, blogging became big business, professional whiners (of which I occasionally classify myself) burst onto the scene, and became experts.

While it’s true, my fifty-plus credits in story, plot, characterization, pacing, method and writing craft, screenwriting and all the rest of it may make me more of an authority than the Fat-beard at the Comic Shop whose most insightful criticism is akin to “Best  Van Damme film ever.” I’m no more an expert than the next guy.*

As I peruse the blogosphere (which the Micro$oft dictionary considers a word apparently) I’m finding thousands of experts, all shouting their opinions on film, politics, literature, poetry, religion, tacos.

This isn’t what blogs are about. Blogs should be about fun – reading some else’s dirty laundry, the voyeuristic rush of peeking into the lives of others, what I call the “Delicate Art of the Human Spectacle.”

No sane person hits up a blog to learn how to re-wire their home! Or how to fix the plumbing from their septic tank to the new guest toilet! Imagine, some greasy handed plumber, sitting down with his morning Chai tea and powering up his Mac Awesomebook and composing a step by step instructional blog for his website (cleverly titled something like Betweenthecrack.com) on how to install proper piping for your pooper. He might order a bagel with lox (gag) while his fat, sausage-like fingers hammer away, struggling to hit the proper keys,  wondering when to use Ergo, Id Est and Exempli Gratia in his rather terse prose.

Yeah. Right.

Not only would said plumber be putting himself out of business by sharing his hard earned knowledge and trade secrets with his eager readers,  but typically, plumbers tend not to be literati.**

I say let’s bring back the spectacle. let’s get some of that Gutspill.com, visceral, reality-show, blogging going on. Let’s hear about your vicious aunt or your drunk cousin, or your mother-in-law who just knows you’re a bad mom… come on folks the holidays are the most psychologically trying times our culture has manufactures. Let’s see some spectacle…

*Okay, that’s not entirely true, I went college to become an expert on those things, but I think my point is valid.

**Obviously, this is a generalization not meant to offend any intelligentsia plumbers who might be reading.

***Second post with Micro$oft Writer, I’m not possessed nor indentured, yet.

That attitude is/was such a violation of logic and free enterprise and healthy competition and everything else the internet promised or stood for, it was enough to drive designers and developers mad. Not to mention the browser wars and the vicious disinformation campaigns against non-Micro$oft products.

When I worked in advertising, one of our main clients used a bubble-gum and prayer NT system for their multi-million dollar e-commerce rig. They measured up time (on their test environment) in hours. Our duplicate test environment measured up time in months – the only difference being that ours was a Unix server.

But enough about this wretched history of Micro$oft. I’m talking about their wretched future. This new Blogging app, Writer,  hasn’t crashed yet. But upon clicking that fateful download button, my VIAO lurched into a wild seizure of downloads and installs, updates and god knows what else. When the dust settled, I was being asked to set up a Windows Live profile – something I didn’t want to do, didn’t set out to do.

But credit where do, Writer is still so far, a pretty nifty little app. It’s not much different than any other bloggers apps, except that you get the added comfort of knowing it’s a quality Micro$oft product riding wild through your trusty computer’s electrons.

post-script -

Write in Writer, send it up to my website, my LiveJournal and to a few other selected blog outlets as well. Is this a good thing? Probably not, but we all love convenience.