Cheese

The glorious thing we call the internet has reached a new high. That's right, ladies and gents, you can now watch mold grow on cheese! in real time, no less. Finally something we can waste out time with that is less outdoorsy than watching grass grow and less stinky than watching paint dry.

I'm not sure what disturbs me most about this website.

At first it may be the 643,774 (and counting) hits. But it occurs to me that very few of those are probably return viewers. And I am one of them, as will be anyone who clicks on the link to the cheese page from here. So, I'm going to give at least 600,000 of those people the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure they, just like I did, had to check it out to see if it was actually real.

The cheese has a myspace page too. That is... special.

And now I'm perpetuating the success of the website. After all, fame on the web is counted by how many people know about and/or visit your site. On the other hand, very few people ever read this little blog of mine, so I'm not really making much difference at all.

And speaking of blogs (I guess this post is going to be longer than I originally intended), I was reading a Frost Bytes in this week's City Weekly and found this little bit kind of interesting:

• Heard of “ghost blogs”? They’re blogs started by briefly gung-ho writers and diarists, only to be left for dead after a few entries—there are an estimated 200 million (!) of them haunting the Internet right now. “The extraordinary failure rate of online diaries and claims that interest in blogging will soon begin a precipitous slide are sparking an intriguing debate about the future of self-expression on the Internet and whether blogs, once seen as revolutionary, are destined to become a footnote in the history of computing,” said a U.K. Sunday Times report. “Others liken the abandonment of blogs to ‘the suicide of your virtual self’ … At least one Internet writer blames the blogging culture for helping to turn the Internet into a dictatorship of idiots.’”

I find this somewhat encouraging actually. Not that I have anything against blogging, obviously, but I think it may have gotten out of hand. A few weeks ago on Talk of the Nation (NPR show) there was a discussion of the deprivitisation of our lives thanks to internet/wireless communications. People blog about little minute details of their life, and millions and millions of people can read about it. It makes things much less private. It's like airing your dirty laundry and inviting the neighbors over to take a good whiff.

There are also the super politcal blogs done by kids who think they know everything. They bother me. The amount of information available online these days is astounding without every Tom Dick and Harry having his say. And people are slowly loosing their ability to weed the good stuff from the bad stuff. That's a whole other issue though, and I don't want to go into it.

There are, of course, some good blogs. Some news orginizations have blogs which help them connect to thier readers. It's like a 'letters to the editor' page, but less formal. There are also a few blogs that do reviews (of movies, tv shows, celebrities) and those are fun.

And then there are blogs like this one that just don't give a shit. I do this thing because I want to. I don't care that very few people read it. I enjoy writing it, and it's really fun for me to go back and see what I've posted over the years. I can go on about whatever I want and I wont be impossing my little tirades on anyone who doesn't want to read them.

I wonder what the future of 'sef-expression on the internet' will bring. Certainly a continued breakdown of personal privacy. Maybe more moldy cheese?