Friday, July 18, 2008

B-Story Blogging

Are there bloggers that you otherwise like who periodically write about stuff that you wish they wouldn't? I call this "B-story blogging." While the blog is 90% about one thing (or one kind of thing) the blogger periodically wedges in some other topic that he/she is personally interested in, but that they might not be all that qualified to write about.

For example, today Matt Yglesias writes:

I keep forgetting to blog about Denver's salary dump trade sending Marcus Camby to the Clippers even though the Center for American Progress primarily hired me because John Podesta felt they had to beef up their NBA coverage to prepare for the looming era of having a hoops fan in the White House.
Yglesias is poking fun at himself because he 1) likes basketball and 2) blogs about basketball even though 3) probably nobody but Matt's friends care what he thinks about basketball and 4) his blogging about basketball isn't really very good.

In another example, I actually like John Gruber's Stanley Kubrick obsession, Ron Silliman's movie reviews are often pretty good (but not nearly as good as his reviews/writings on poetry), and James Fallows's thoughts on the Olympics while he's living in China are always worth a read. In short, some bloggers handle their B-story blogging much better than others.

B-story blogging is often an aftereffect of a blog emerging from (or converging on) a personal diary. At its best, it's a window into the full set of preoccupations and assumptions of the author. At its worst, it's chatter.

What about you? Is there any category of post on Short Schrift you'd rather never see again?

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