Respect the blog!

Although the post this links to is a week old now, I've only just discovered it. I hadn't read the Times on-line article (entitled with almost tabloid-style alarm: 'Danger Online: Perils of Revealing Every Intimate Moment') before. But having only written recently myself about this amazing on-line community of bloggers, it's serendipity that Don Mills Diva should have made her stand. If you haven't read her post, click the link above. And if you value what you do here in the blog-o-sphere, then say so: put the 'Write On' button on your side bar and step up!

Clearly, someone out there dislikes bloggers. It's rather odd for a national newspaper to talk disapprovingly of people 'surrendering their privacy', still less one of the Murdoch stable asking whether there isn't a temptation in blogging to 'expose more and more of yourself, like a striptease artist'.

Personally, I regard blogs and bloggers as the on-line equivalent of independent publishers. We may not have the audience (and certainly not the money) of the big guns, but what we say is often worth reading in its own right - not just because some journalist (or more likely, editor) has decided that it's what his readers (and it's usually a 'him') will want to read. We get to read about the people we are interested in, people with something to say and a story to tell.

Newspaper circulation is in free-fall; if it wasn't for advertising revenue, there'd be no national broadsheets, and not many tabloids. And how much longer are advertisers going to pay for something that is dwindling in effectiveness? Long-live the independent blogger!