Written by David Tebbutt in October 2005

I've spent the best part of a year deeply immersed in the public blog world and, frankly, I'm getting sick of it. So-called A-list bloggers spout whatever's on their minds, just because they're A-list bloggers and it's what they do. They can't stop because their identity is totally bound up in the blog. Never mind all the millions of other people's person-hours they gobble up daily. For every gem they post, a lot of them will post a bunch of space-fillers on the off-chance that someone else might be interested.

Challenge them on a factual error and they will airily suggest that it doesn't matter, the blogosphere is self-correcting. Yeah, right. Having picked up, and maybe believed, some astonishing claim, who on earth is going to revisit the post to see if any corrections have been added. No-one, that's who.

Anyone who participates in this world to any degree quickly realises that it is impossible to keep up with all the bloggers who might, just occasionally post something interesting and relevant. A Technorati, or similar, RSS watchlist will keep an eye out for key terms, but there's no real indication of quality. You can check up on inbound links, which will give a clue, but these are likely to be tiny in a specialist area. And, yes, you could study the relative numbers but this would be a pretty time consuming business for very little return.

Not only this but if you're like me and you're taking over a hundred RSS feeds and you stop looking for a day or two, you'll find that you just can't face the mountainous task of catching up. Either you mark them all read, refine your lists and start again, or you end up feeling totally inadequate and have a nervous breakdown.

The world has always been full of opinion and information and most of it has been filtered and channeled by kindly editors and journalists to make it digestible and, hopefully, accurate and informative or entertaining. We then choose the paper or broadcast streams that most closely match our interests and values and settle for the resulting world view. We are largely unaware of just how ill-informed and ignorant we are. Sadly, the blogosphere has the unfortunate effect of rubbing our noses in our ignorance.

The problem with a lot of public bloggers is that they don't attempt to focus and filter. They pretend to, but then the 'post at any cost' imperative overwhelms them and the cost is usually to the poor reader who finds the noise to signal ratio increasing daily.

However, in the commercial world it's a different story. Companies who blog, internally or externally, at least have a focus. Within the organisation, the good individual blogger is often someone with a particular interest or expertise who acts as a magnet to others who share the interest. If postings drift off topic, then readers will tire and move away. And no-one, apart from the blogger, is going to get stressed if the blog goes quiet when there's nothing to report.

And the same goes for outward-facing blogs. If you're a company that decides it wants to share its views on chocolate-making, you'd make yourselves look pretty foolish if you blogged about Kate Moss' latest exploits. Unless, of course, they involved chocolate.

Blogs are a darned good therapy for people who need to get stuff off their chests and they don't care who, if anyone, reads them. They fall down badly when the motivation is self-aggrandisement. The very best blogs are the ones that share useful information and welcome thoughtful feedback.