Yokel Blogger

I've been getting a tad pissed off recently. Shane Richmond has practically accused me of being a blog yokel in his Telegraph blog because I objected to the use of the word 'filter' in the blogosphere

Blogs have been described as a type of filter too, albeit a human one. Here relevance is simply determined by the affinity you have with the blogger. If your interests are a close match for theirs, they'll be a good filter.

It's that notion of blogs as filters that gives one of the biggest blogs on the internet its name: MetaFilter. It is intended to filter the filters.

None of which changes your point about the accuracy of the word. It's meaning isn't a perfect fit for the purpose intended but it will certainly be understood by close followers of the web and the blogosphere.

Shane Richmond at 12 Jan 2007 15:07

This comes from a quote by Ben Schott (who he?):

A.(Schott) "I tend to write it quite selfishly. I don't think you can write for a particular audience. I tend to look at any news story and say, Well, what do I need to know? Who are these people? Has this happened before? What's increasingly interesting about modern media is its filters: if you actually look at websites, technology from TiVo to iPods to blogs, it's all about filter. What we mean when we say we like a blog or we like a website is that we like somebody's filter. And we have several filters for different things. Of course our friends are filters. Word of mouth is the ultimate filter. So what I try to do is act as a personal filter. When I say personal, I don't mean political or partisan, I mean, What's the Schott's Almanac take on this? It's almost a sort of character."

How can someone be a filter? What a load of bollocks. He takes a very nice, ordinary word which means sifting the good from the bad, relevant from the irrelevant, and tries to make it into a mega word with a sweeping definition far beyond its capacity.

Then this piece of jargon is accepted as is into the blogosphere by all the wannabe hip and with-it Bens and anyone who objects is accused of being a non-hip, with-not yokel. Unfortunately, liberating words from the irritating shackles of new sub-definitions is beyond my capacities, so I will suffer this one, as an insult, but I will never surrender!

signed,
St Bloggie de Yokeliere.
Proudly yokel.