But What's the point of it all?
By Matt Miner
Mark and I have been posting entries on minerbrothers.com for about a month now and it’s worth answering the question “What is this blog about, anyway?”. It is also worth saying what this blog is not about. Mark and I may be destined for obscurity in the blogosphere for what we don’t write and how we don’t write it.
This post was catalyzed by Joseph Rago’s great commentary in the Wall Street Journal, The Blog Mob (subscription required). Mr. Rago writes:
The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM [main stream media] like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.
I was amused to find this article while considering what I would write for minerbrothers. Mark and I are not about being remora fish. We don't think we're journalists. Minerbrothers.com is the Miner Brothers’ views on wide-ranging stuff. I tend to think a good deal about business and entrepreneurship as well as economic and social issues, so I frequently write on those topics. Minerbrothers.com is a digest of Miner Brother Thought. The point of the blogging exercise is for Mark and me to collaborate with each other and to exercise the right sides of our brains, since we both felt those western hemispheres might be at risk to atrophy as Mark labors in SolidWorks™ and I grind out cost-models in Excel.
Mr. Rago continues:
More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren't much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.
Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion.
Mark and I aspire to quality. We will not be able to measure up to the editorial standards of WSJ, due to resource constraints, but we strive for excellence. When we notice typos we correct them. If you disagree with our grammar, syntax or word usage, let us know in a comment or e mail.
Mark and I vary the tone of our prose. We try to match the length of the post to the topic under consideration. Complexity and complication are embraced at minerbrothers.com, though we try to be concise and incisive. Solipsistic argument is rejected; conversation is desired. Irony is welcome.
Let us know whether we’re succeeding or failing as a non-mob blog and whether the posts are worth a trip back to the site. We may not change anything as a result of your feedback, but we’d be interested to know your thoughts in any case. Comment or e-mail minerbrothers at gmail.com.
Merry Christmas!
Matt Miner
