I do think we’re past the point where an review piece covering several blogging-related books needs the standard potted history of blogging (it’s nearly a decade now) and the NYRB can be fusty at times. But no-one’s quite come up with an alternative Standard Opening Few Grafs on teh weblogs. What’s needed in a piece like this is an acknowledgement of that standard opening — the brief history and definition — that pushes past it.

The trouble? Links—those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another Web site. (Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source.) It’s not only that the links are hard to transpose into print. It’s that the whole culture of linking—composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references— doesn’t sit happily in a book. Yes, I’m talking about bloggy writing itself.

How do I document sources from the Web in my works-cited list?
The MLA guidelines on documenting online sources are explained in detail in the sixth edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (2003) and in the second edition of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (1998). What follows here is a summary of the guidelines that cover the World Wide Web. For the complete MLA recommendations on Web sources, please see one of the books mentioned above.”

Wonderful information is found on the intertubes…

When I got to “A blog, for those who don’t know, is a journal or log that appears on a Web site,” I almost moved on to something else. [That famous blogger short attention span, I suppose.]

I resolved to stick with it, though, and made it a few paragraphs later to–lord help us all–”they’ll often use an OMG (Oh my god!) or an emoticon, e.g., a smiley face or a wink or a frown instead of words. (Tilt your head to the left to see the emoticons here.)”

I seem to recall that The New Republic had already pronounced emoticons ho-hum by about 1990. I haven’t heard of anyone needing to have the “tilt your head” part explained to them since sometime during Reagan’s second term. In fact, it might have been Reagan himself who needed the explanation.

Can it be that the readers of TNYRB, devoted book-lovers to a fault, have had absolutely zero exposure to blogs?

Sure, they’re not all bloggers or blog readers. But to assume they don’t even know what one is?

To assume they have no idea about interactive websites, or email, or prime-time television or movies, all of which freely lift and refer to the structures, conventions, and content of blogs and have done so for a while, for much the same reason that all teen-aged sit-com characters in the 1960s formed a rock and roll band and that Willie Sutton robbed banks?

Would an article in Car & Driver assume that its readers had never seen or heard of a train, a bicycle, or an airplane? [”A bicycle, for those of you who don’t know, is a two-wheeled vehicle powered by a rider who uses foot pedals to turn a drive chain to the rear wheel.”]

I’ll admit it: I bailed for good before the author had the chance to get to Siegel or Hewett. I suppose it would serve me right if that part was fascinating and insightful.

Perhaps it was inevitable, since the author hangs the review on a pretty unsteady peg: The problems of creating a book-form anthology of blogs. As she gradually seems to have learned, such a project is probably doomed to create the same sense of creative disappointment as showing someone a snapshot of a juggler juggling [which is then quickly discovered to be indistinguishable from a snapshot of someone simply lobbing objects into the air]. It should have been the signal to shut down the review and go back to the drawing board.

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