A couple of years ago, when I first came across these viral infections making their way across the Internet I was thoroughly unimpressed. Blogs seemed to be nothing more than sophisticated "diaries". Indeed, many web sites offered what were called live journals, originally started as a place for kids to keep their diaries. What was interesting is that they kept it up on the web so their parents would not get a hold of it, but the whole world was allowed access to these diaries. Blogs seemed to be the next step, feeding the dreams of frustrated authors wanting to get something off their chests and trying to get the rest of the world to listen.

I grew to hate Blogs.

As time went on, Blogs still earned my disdain. Becoming ever-more-popular, now they were the realm of would-be webmasters. Those who could not really understand the intricacies of the web and the creation of "real" HTML pages went to the ever increasing number of servers offering free Blog space and software. There they created within limitations of the Blog what would be called "mini web sites". Oh, nothing with the sophistication of their 500000 page full blown web-site cousins, but nevertheless something that could be looked upon as a place to disseminate information within the vast pits of the world wide web.

I still hated Blogs.

Then as the weeks and months rolled by and the major players such as Google entered the Blog craze, the serious snobs of Internet technology began to take notice. It was the revolt of the plebeians against those who spent their lives matching colors, memorizing Hex Codes, creating menus and finding content for their sites. The Bloggers had the audacity to put up their pages within minutes and begin to start writing, adding, composing and generally taking on the world in the time it took to create the bare shell of one web page. My God! They even used spell checkers!

Oh boy, did I really hate Blogs then.

Then, and when I think upon it to this day, I still cringe - the inevitable happened. One of my clients in a show of how "technologically-minded" he was, began telling me all about his Blog. Trying to impress me with terms such as "tables" and "permalinks" and telling me how he learned HTML by messing with his Blog template, made my blood pressure shoot through the roof.

"Hey," he said with a big evil grin on his face, "It isn't that hard! You always made it seem so mysterious. I mean I Blog all the time!"

At that moment I could have thermally burned every Blog in the universe.

And of course I could not get over the useless amount of information that was out there in these Blogs. Millions upon millions of web pages, or precious gigabytes, of golden bandwidth taken up with the musings of people who had nothing better to do! And the Blogs still kept on growing.

I hated them.

Then it happened. I knew it would. I knew it had to. I just knew it. A client asked me why I didn't have a Blog for my company. After all, Web Sites are great but Blogs he said, were ever better. And so I bit the bullet and put up a one page Blog, linked my "web-site" to it and promptly after 3 days forgot all about it. Let the Bloggers have their Blogs. Real Men & Ladies do Web Sites!

One day while I was about to tear out what was left of my hair in the good old war with the Search Engine Trinity - Google, Yahoo and MSN - trying to figure out just why one keyword was working and the 9,999 others were not, and why my page rank was moving like a yo-yo, and I felt no matter what I did to improve my rank only made it worse, SUDDENLY I see in MSN my site pop up on the first page where it had never been before. At least I thought it was my site. So doing a dance in my chair, and yelling YES YES YES - I click on the link and voila, suddenly my stomach churns in disgust and total nausea. I am brought face-to-face with the Blog I put up 3 months beforehand. NOT MY WEB SITE! MY BLOG!

I hate Blogs with a passion. But you better believe you will find me Blogging every day from now on.

Copyright 2005 Ted W. Gross. All rights reserved. (You may publish this article in its entirety with the following author's information with live links only.)