Fear and loathing online

Apparently while drunk, or possibly high, the editors of beepcentral.com thought it would be a good idea to set me loose on the Internet with a blog.\nNever one to turn down work (I'm so desperate for cash I'd freelance for Cat Fancy right now), I accepted on one condition -- they explain to me what in the heck a blog is.\n"It's like, um, a place for you to post your opinions on the news, but, uh ... you can post stuff about your daily life too, kinda like MySpace," my editor said.\n"Do I have to get a faux hawk and write bad poetry about cutting myself like on MySpace, too?" \n"Uh ... sure. Whatever. Just turn something in by tomorrow."\nAnd with that, my blogging career began. In my first week, I was the most clicked-on blogger with a whopping eight hits, four of which came from computers other than my own! That makes me roughly the 801,204,347th most clicked-on Internet site, just ahead of mydoglookslikelouieanderson.net. Watch out fakenudepicsofconniechung.org, because you're next on my hit list!\nDespite the runaway success of my blog, I was still unsure of exactly what direction to take with this bold new technology. So I decided to look up blogging on that great suppository (and yes, that's the word I mean to use as anything on there should most definitely be taken in anally) of Internet knowledge -- Wikipedia. \nAccording to Wikipedia, a blog is "a type of Web site where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order."\nIn short: No one really knows what the heck a blog is supposed to be. I think some hipster just made the word up to get laid at a party back in 2001, and as it kept getting more and more people laid, it accidentally caught on and became a real word. \nOr maybe it has something to do with the synergy of convergence.\nDejected, I began to go back to my usual routine of randomly inserting the word "poop" into Wikipedia entries, when I stumbled on the entry for "gonzo journalism."\nThe brainchild of Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalism "favors style over accuracy and aims to describe personal experiences or the essence or mood of things rather than facts. It disregards the 'polished' edited product favored by newspaper media and strives for the gritty factor."\nThe entry continues: "Gonzo journalism is characterized by the use of quotes, sarcasm, humor, exaggeration and profanity."\nSee, the thing about bloggers is that a lot of them have absolutely no credentials or experience with journalism. It's just random people spouting completely unedited crap.\nOf course it's only the good crap, the crap with an underlying truth, that actually sticks to the wall -- and that people look back on fondly saying, "Ah, yes, that was a fine burrito that came out of me."\nThompson killed himself thinking that gonzo journalism had failed, yet blogging is making it more viable than ever.