Weblogger Jeremy Zawodny’s much-blinked list seems to be putting the fear of God into many other webloggers in a frenzied rush to comply with what for some puzzling reason is being seen as the Received Wisdom. (It’s actually amazing he didn’t phrase these ten items as “thou shalt” ‘s and “shalt not” ‘s!) Zawodny is profoundly (I use the term advisedly) thrilled at his influence, declaring, “Blogs rock!” Unfortunately, he forgets the eleventh habit of annoying bloggers — pontificating on how it should be done, although his #3 is a complaint about bloggers who “spend more time blogging about blogging than anything else.”

(Not to mention his commission of the admittedly more minor twelfth annoying habit — overuse of “blog” and “blogger”. Lawdy, I’m surprised he doesn’t indulge in the even more annoying “blogosphere.” [Shoot me and put me out of my misery if I ever use that word without quotation marks around it, please. — FmH]

My overall reaction to his list is that he doesn’t seem to understand (especially in his #2 and #8, which he concedes are alike but, he asserts enigmatically and without further elaboration for readers as dense as myself, “not quite the same”) the self-referential, organic nature of hyperlinked reality if he thinks there’s an absolute difference between “original content” and “aggregating links to other blogs”, or between “acting” and “reacting”… and that he is the arbiter of such difference. Wake up, Jeremy, it’s a postmodern world. Authenticity and derivativeness are not, in a simple sense, dichotomous anymore, if they ever were. He also does not appear to appreciate that weblogging arose from the practice of cataloguing the author’s interesting websurfing discoveries (often with little or no commentary), which in a semiotic sense (upon which I will enigmatically not elaborate much) does build a sort of original content from the aggregation and juxtaposition. Hint: start with Claude Levi-Strauss’ use of the term ‘bricolage’. Indeed, it is a postmodern tenet that the “originality” will lie not in the writer so much as in the reader’s synthesis of meaning for herself from the work. Making it all too explicit is another annoying habit of webloggers. I hope the people who read FmH (all three of them) do it because they know I esteem their astuteness more than they should mine. Now, if they found me a highly annoying blogger…