Blogging is a strange beast. To the left is the useful side of it, where people can document interesting facts and information to help others, as well as giving their websites’ interactivity with its audience. To the right is the crappy side, where people write overly opinionated crap about everyday life, and even that wouldn’t be so bad if some of these people didn’t get so far up their own asses the second they get a few readers.

Then there’s what I like to call the middle, where all the average Blog’s reside, sponging away at the Web 2.0 machine to get some money. Ironically, some of the most popular Blog’s on the Internet, the ones making lots of money from advertising and affiliate links are about making money, and whilst a large number of these do give out some worthwhile advice to those who are obviously seeking it a lot of these just dose out common-sense pills from time to time.

This ‘issue’ almost embodies the new age of the Internet, where instead of sharing information and content we donned our finest eMini-skirt and whored ourselves for money, where we expertly mixed together songs and clips from cartoons to an audience of over 35 Million viewers, and changed our statuses from giggly to cautious every couple of minutes. Somewhere along the way the Internet became more about money and popularity, rather than giving people what they want.

In some ways Google has helped to save the world from this, as they have kept content as the king of the Internet.

Just by searching everyday terms on Google you can find many old and modern websites that still cater exclusively to creating useful information for others, often by authors that carry out their own research and use their own ideas to create new content. This is where Blogging becomes very successful for many (in theory), as those Blogs that write great content are rewarded with traffic and eventually money in return.

One of my favourite Blog’s is Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood. It is one of the very few websites that I can actually read without wanting to plough my fists through my monitor. To top all of that it’s informative too! Jeff Atwood is a fantastic writer that manages to cover original topics almost every single day without needing to be a full-time Blogger. Just from reading his Blog daily I’ve learnt more than a year of Higher Education has provided me.

In my eyes this type of Blog has found the perfect format of almost ‘recycling’ known information. Through occasional references to external websites a new revision of information has been spawned, readily available to all of his viewers, through his website, RSS feeds or through Google search results.

This is one of the few areas where Blogging has succeeded through conventional web pages regarding finding information. A Blogger is just performing Quality Management on the world’s content, and whilst sometimes it can have disastrous consequences it should be heralded as a step forward in the free information age.