Columnist Compares Blogs to Minesweeper

Posted on February 18, 2006

A blog blasting opinion article by Joe Lavin of the Boston Herald compares the time lost reading blogs to the time lost playing Minesweeper. Lavin says procrastinating with Minesweeper may be more valuable.

I have spent far too much time reading them while so many other tasks were left undone.

As a writer, I have lied to myself all these years and claimed that I was merely doing research. I told myself I was simply looking for interesting subjects about which to write.

No, I was procrastinating by reading about the lives of complete strangers.

At least, when I used to procrastinate with Minesweeper, I was developing important skills that I might later use in the unlikely event that I am ever recruited to become an international peacekeeper.

With blogs, I was just wasting time.

That's pretty low to call blogs a bigger time waste than playing Minesweeper. Later on in the article Lavin admits that some blogs have value but he also takes a snipe at the length of blog posts.

I am not saying that there is nothing of value in blogs. There are many excellent ones, even though I often wish the writers would spend more than a paragraph on a subject.

Not all blog posts are as short as one paragraph but the concise nature of blog posts is part of what makes them popular. People can read a lot of blogs and get a lot of different points of view about one story or idea in a short amount of time. Lavin does have a point that you can procrastinate and spend too much time reading blogs but you can do that with news articles and opinion pieces as well.