Lovely Guardian piece by Scott Rosenberg on the strange hostility evoked by blogging in conventional minds…

From the dawn of blogging it’s been tempting for established professionals to reject blogging as trivial and unreliable. Epitomising this stance most recently is Tom Wolfe – who, in a brief essay accompanying the Wall Street Journal’s blog birthday celebration, dismissed the blogosphere as “a universe of rumours”. To support this charge, he cited an inaccuracy in Wikipedia’s entry about himself. Of course the online encyclopedia is not a blog at all. But critics like Wolfe can’t be bothered making distinctions. He admitted that Wikipedia isn’t “strictly a blog” but claimed it “shares the genre’s characteristics”, and dismissed a universe of blogs on the basis of a single Wikipedia inaccuracy – which was, naturally, immediately corrected. If it’s online, apparently, it’s all the same, and all worthless.

It’s hard to take Wolfe’s assessment of blogging seriously since he admits that, “weary of narcissistic shrieks and baseless ‘information’,” he doesn’t read them himself. In any case, those who obsessively review their own Wikipedia entries for errors might pause before accusing others of narcissism…