The Case of Blogging

When I was a little boy, everyone (who doesn’t have a penis) in my school had diaries. They come in many different sizes and colors, but popular ones are pinks and reds. Inside, you’ll find doodlings, boys names, shapes of hearts, and if you’re lucky, you’ll find amazingly long rants about how a specific boy broke one’s heart. How do I know this? I have a friend (who doesn’t have a penis) which tells me all these things, she even showed me some of these diaries.

Writing, drawing, doodling, ranting, recording a video or whatever you call it is the what everyone knows now (or part of it) as blogging. I’m not gonna talk about micro-blogging or super-duper-tiny-audio-hip-blogging, just blogging in general, for now. Or perhaps the technically correct word is long post. The dubbed ‘Father of blogging’ here, Mr. Enda Nasution, said:

Blog merupakan kependekan dari Weblog dimana seseorang bikin log dari perjalanan di web.

In translation, it’s a chronological one’s log jotted down on the web. We even have a National Blogger Day which occurs every October 27th and an annual event to proudly say “we’re bloggers! we’re elite! yaay!” called Pesta Blogger. Somewhere in 2009, I tweeted this:

‘Blogger’ is not an elite term anymore, stop abusing it. #buzzmarketingkeyword

Why? Because everyone’s been yelling about the rise of bloggers, how bloggers are the it thing, etc, at that time. Thumbs up for the first Pesta Blogger 2007 by Bubu in Blitzmegaplex, they rounded up around 2000 people if I remember correctly. In 2007, blogger is what you know now as trending topic. In 2009, people who write crap or don’t know that all they write are crap still call themselves blogger. In 2010, do you (still) call yourself a blogger? No disrespect to word smiths or journalists out there, but I’m just sayin’.

I’m not a blogger, let alone a writer, I barely write anything longer than 140 chars. All I do is re-everything; retweet, reblog, rewrite, repost, re-everything. I’m too damn lazy to write a long post. Blogger now has shifted into social media, disbursted into 140 chars. No longer we see bloggers update their blog every day, unless you’re a news site. What we see now are 140 chars at a time, no longer 1 post at a time, it’s one hundred forty characters. 140 is the new long post.

Hats off to those of you who still run the spirit of true blogging, middle fingers to you fakers. So, Indonesia, are you (really) a blogger?