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On an average morning, I get up, make coffee, sit down at my computer and check my e-mail before rushing out into the blogosphere -- a place I have recently decided to vacate for good.

First, I would visit the celebrity sites -- a sordid collection of gossip and venom peddlers, entertaining enough to get the columnist's bile flowing. Gawker.com is a New York-based site that specializes in celebrity takedowns disguised as sightings ("Lindsay Lohan was there with a pretty large posse. Only two bathroom trips and she seemed to be holding it together alright. She's still way skinny, BTW"). Then there's Gofugyourself.com, a website devoted to cataloguing and revelling in the truly astonishing and seemingly endless litany of celebrity fashion mishaps.

After that, I might check out some American and Canadian political/media blogs (Wonkette, Daily Kos, Paul Wells, Andrew Coyne) before moving on to more "established" information sources.

The day I decided to swear off the blogosphere was the morning I decided to plug my own name -- and the names of several other writers I know and admire -- into the search engine at technorati.com, a site known as Blogger HQ (it claims to itemize every new blog on the Internet; last time I checked, the head count was more than 28 million). The results of my search were grim: countless chat rooms full of bitter unpublished writers venomously slagging published ones -- their terrible spelling, poorly constructed sentences and outrageous amounts of displaced hatred and envy a testimony to why they became bloggers in the first place.

Despite early optimistic reports that the Internet and all its unregulated glory was going to supplant the mainstream media, in reality the opposite has happened. When a blog is readable, the blogger tends to be either one of two things: a professional commentator who is providing a venue for public debate among his or her own readers (as with Coyne and Wells), or a talented up-and-comer. In the case of the latter, the blogger is inevitably lured into the establishment with a book deal or position at an above-board publication (as with the last two editors of Wonkette, who both received six-figure book deals for outing Washingtonienne blogger Jessica Cutler, who in turn received her own six-figure book deal and an invitation to pose for Playboy).

So the underground media revolution is officially over. Further proof: The February issue of Vanity Fair ran a photo featuring the Internet's top commentators, including the typists behind Gawker, Defamer and Wonkette. "The irony was sweet," Trevor Butterworth wrote last week in the Financial Times. "Gawker was supposed to make fun of this kind of inside-the-establishment posing. But the victory was sweeter: It was a signal moment, a benediction from a magazine that, more than any other, has become the plush chronicler of the celebrity establishment."

My own problem with the blogosphere is not that it's selling out to the mainstream, but that most of it is spectacularly boring. The dominant quality is tedium: writers without editors, fact-checkers or paying subscribers to keep them in check. As Butterworth succinctly puts it: "If the pornography of opinion doesn't leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium."

Why then, other than hearing the sound of his own voice unfettered by editorial nips and tucks, does the blogger blog? One tempting explanation is that what a blogger has to say is unfit for publication. This is usually true. Much like teachers who teach because they can't do, the blogger blogs because he can't publish.

But this doesn't hold up in all cases. Take my friend and peer David Eddie. A Toronto-based novelist, journalist and screenwriter, Eddie maintains a blog at http://www.davideddie.com even though he invariably has several other professional writing projects on the go. When I ask him (slightly incredulously) why on Earth he would bother to write down his opinions for free, he shrugs.

"It's a good way to limber up. You get up in the morning, fire up a blog, write the thing in 15 minutes and then you know what's on your mind. I think it was Nabokov who said, 'How do I know what's on my mind until I write it down?' "

Eddie's blog is whimsical and soul-searching, devoid of all the self-serving spitefulness of many other whiners in the sphere. I find myself checking it just to see what he's thinking. The beauty of the blog, as he points out, is that it's informal and free-flowing, as opposed to formal journalism, which can be stilted. For established writers then, the attraction is creativity.

That's fine for some, but it isn't enough of a reason for me to go on-line -- where the growing, unedited noise in the margins is too loud to ignore -- when I can enjoy my favourite writers in more established venues. If I'm supposed to feel part of some cool, fringe community, or world-changing global discussion, I'm not getting it.

As Choire Sicha, formerly of Gawker and now a senior editor at the New York Observer, told the Financial Times, the democratic promise of blogs has produced more fragmentation at a time when seeing the bigger picture is much more important.

"The word blogosphere has no meaning," he said. "There is no sphere; these people aren't connected; they don't have anything to do with each other. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire-service feeds."

Which is exactly why I'm swearing off the blogosphere for good -- except, of course, for the celebs in bad outfits.

lmclaren@globeandmail.com

Top five signs the '80s are still with us

1. Black leggings, shoulder pads and asymmetry on the runway.

2. Talking Heads-inspired bands like Stars and Arcade Fire.

3. Black fingernail polish.

4. Cowboy looks.

5. Graffiti, this time for interiors.

-- KvH