Save the internet, or: How I learned to stop reading BoingBoing and love the blog.

STOP SOPA, SAVE THE INTERNET – Boing Boing.

Wow! Big deal! Hugely important! And one of the biggest “blogs” on the internet decided to talk about it!
You’re one of the biggest blogs around, commanding giant respect and readership. It’s great that you decide to talk about issues, but where’s the “Click here to find out how to contact your representative”? Apparently you care enough to copy-paste content from another blog, (At least that’s what I think you did? But you didn’t link to it so I’m not sure.) but not enough to help your giant readership figure out what to do to help? I call that failure.

Let’s hit that other point a bit more too. I don’t know what content on this page is actually Cory Doctorow’s writing and opinion and what is simply a copy-paste from someone else. I’m pretty sure that the dark background is the “block quote” style, so I think this entire article is simply a copy-pasta job.

Maybe there’s a place for something like boingboing, something that’s more stream-of-consciousness blather than actual blogging. Being considered one of the “big blogs” though and then doing crap like this just leeches respectability from every blog out there that’s trying to be significant, newsworthy, or relevant. Not that I don’t believe there’s a place for stream-of-consciousness, but take a look at something like Scalzi’s Whatever blog for an example how you can be a serious blogger as well as do things like post pictures of bacon taped to cats. I’m just not sure I’ve ever found enough redeeming value in boingboing to offset the damage I think they do. Dear boingboing: You are the reason the internet generation is ADD and apathetic. Stop it.

tl;dr: I actually stopped reading BoingBoing a long time ago. You probably should too. 🙂 Now go write to your representative and save the internet!

Also, yes, I know that I didn’t post a “how to take action” link either. But this post isn’t a call to action for anything other than unsubscribing from boingboing so I think I get a pass. I may try and write more about saving the internet later.