Sometimes, there's even less winning than usual.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal ran an article to commemorate what it loosely estimated to be the 10th anniversary of blogging. Far from the flak that blogs often catch from the media establishment, this piece was a veritable celebration. It asked a collection of luminaries from Mia Farrow to Newt Gingrich what their favourite blogs were, and fawningly posed the question, "What would we do without blogs?"
And what do you think the blogs had to say about this?
"Wall Street Journal tries to re-write blogging history," ran the headline on Techmeme, one of the big blogging sites. Apparently, the Journal's caveats about the fuzziness of blogging's origins weren't strong enough.
It turns out that blogging might not be 10 years old; maybe it's 11, while the word itself is 10. Nobody's quite sure.
That particular headline originated with Duncan Reilly, a "blogging evangelist" who also writes for a highly influential technology blog. He went on at length. "We expect better from the WSJ, even if most of the rest of the mainstream media has long since moved to the gutter."
Another prominent technology blogger, Robert Scoble, sniffed on his site: "I thought mainstream journalists were supposed to get it right and leave inaccuracies and all that to us bloggers." Others agreed.
Meanwhile, the story was picked up on Slashdot.org, a forum for tech-heads.
"Wow, amazing coincidence," came the first retort. "Ten is also the mental age of people who blog."
All of which led me to think that blogging has a public-relations problem on its hands. You can't even celebrate its manifest success without getting a blast from the people who give it a bad name.
Blogs are fixtures of daily life nowadays. They're irreplaceable for covering things like local goings-on and industry-specific news. They're a chic accessory for media-savvy intellectuals and experts. They rule the roost for gossip and celebrity trash - ignoble, maybe, but well-read.
Every newspaper worth its salt, including this one, is busy stocking its website with the things. As recently as 2005, when The New York Times - the old Grey Lady of newspapers - introduced blogs to its website, it couldn't even bring itself to call them "blogs." (It somewhat weakly explained that they were really "web journals" because they lacked certain technical features.) Two years later, the Times doesn't hesitate to call a blog a blog, and they sit at the top of its website.
But blogging just can't seem to get away from the stigma of its early years. It's still trendy to make fun of blogs for being, well, blogs. Just like the word "Wikipedia" can be snorted derisively as a shorthand for dodgy facts, the word "blogging" is still a byword for self-indulgence.
Say "blog" in casual conversation, and it still evokes the spectre of shreiky, pompous demagogues and self-absorbed pedants.
It's a misleading image, but to be sure, the demagogues and pedants are still out there, fouling up the place. You might be one of them. Here's a simple quiz: Do you only blog about other bloggers? Do you engage in public blog-fights with other bloggers, leaving stinging retorts on each other's pages? Have you ever complained that people who don't agree with you "just don't get it?"
Have you ever proved your point by arguing that people with differing views - the non-it-getters - suffer from mental illness? Is every post you write followed by dozens or hundreds of comments from fellow it-getters wishing to burnish their credentials?
Put it like this: If a reasonable third party were to read your blog, would they come away feeling better about being human, or worse? You might disagree with me here, but as a rule of thumb, blogs that make me despair for the species are not good blogs.
