MORE THOUGHTS ON BLOGGING

Woebot responds to comments made by Simon 'Blissblog' Reynolds in interviews, concerning the blogging community.

(Funnily enough I was in Waterstones earlier this week looking for a copy of Simon's new book 'Bring The Noise', without success. Hopefully the wife will track down a copy for me in time for Father's day.)

But coming back to Matt, who typically takes it all personally, there's lots there I agree with. He takes a very honest line when admitting that most of his 'theory' is secondhand/borrowed, and I'm exactly the same, really. Simon's approach to music journalism has coloured my/our view all these years, yet I don't consider myself to have any grand theoretical designs. I just try to write about what I believe in on a very basic emotional level, because that's all I'm capable of.

Regarding the 'halcyon days',I came in at the tail-end of the blogging 'golden age', when it seemed like all the best music/theory blogs were involved in a fascinating organic web of inter-linked discourse. It's true that the Dissensus forum might've contributed to the demise of that 'scene', and I do think it's a bit of a shame. It's like most of the blogs are little islands now, and the big ones like Woebot, K-Punk and Blissblog, by removing the comments box, seem to deliberately shun other's opinions of what they write, though to be fair to Simon, he's never had a comments box anyway, and to be fair to both him and Mark K-P, they both still link and comment on other blogs, perhaps trying to re-energise the interplay. And of course I'm guilty of turning off the comments too. I dunno exactly what provoked them to do so, but in my case it was simply a way of building a mental wall after the mauling I got over some MP3s I posted last year. In some ways it was like Roger Water's concept for Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' concerts - wanting to literally build a wall across the stage because he couldn't stand the sight of the audience. Perhaps that's going too far in my situation...I just needed some protective padding while I got my confidence back. But, jesus, that's nearly a year ago now, and besides I don't have anywhere near the amount of readers I had back then ( and I never had anything like the million hits a month that Matt claims) so I reckon it's time to lighten-up and get things in perspective. My comments box is totally back, so now you can call me a cunt whenever you want. Unfortunately I somehow managed to delete all previous comments, which is a bloody shame cos there were some great contributions to some of my posts, but there's nothing I can do about that now. Stupid, stupid...

Maybe it's time for a few more changes here, too. I think I blogged myself into a corner by getting too focused on current trends within certain areas of dance music, getting too scene-centric. It's so restricting and I just don't have enough to say on the matter to make this blog interesting anymore. Plus it gets a bit boring trying to find different ways of saying the same thing all the time. I'd like to get back to where I was in the latter half of 2004, when it was just random stuff from past and present, without having any direct link to one scene, sound or time period. Time to just shuffle the decks and go with my own flow again.

Maybe...