Summer silliness

Oh dear. Over at the Beeb, technology analyst Bill Thompson bemoans summer silliness on weblogs. Alas, his piece isn't up to much. Already, a daft factual error ("The earliest bloggers have been at it for two years now") has been flagged up by Need to Know and lambasted by Tom Coates. And the Guardian's own Simon Waldman has a pop at the effortless elitism Thompson exhibits ("more and more sites are being created by people with less and less to say"). In this heat, it's probably futile to expend much effort in further critiquing such a lazy piece of writing - the lack of effort shines through, from the meandering subject matter to the dismissal of a medium through the perceived faults of a few. And I'll only note in passing that it's a tad ironic Thompson's column is called "Billblog", in some pisspoor attempt to get with the weblogging crowd. Suffice to say: I think the piece brings us closer to the source of Bill's (and others') antipathy towards weblogs. While small web publishers cannot compete with the big news organisations in primary reporting of major news events, they certainly can compete with ill-considered bilge like this. These research-lite polemicists are the low-hanging fruit.