By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

Well, Internet voyeurs there is a big birthday coming up this week for us to celebrate. It isn’t Tila Tequila, it is Olive Riley, the planet’s oldest living blogger. With Tila you might be paying attention to more than her written blog content but with Ms. Riley at 108 years it is pretty much the written content that holds her fans. Riley is a sweet old lady who is wise and kind and is adaptive enough to put her thoughts down on the web. The content of Olive’s blog isn’t particularly racy or inflammatory she just keeps us all abreast of what is going on at her nursing home in Australia. This birthday celebration for the world’s oldest blogger started me thinking about web logs and what paper dragons “blogs” have become.

The other night one of the political talk show hosts spouted that the voting in the 2008 Presidential election would be heavily influenced by the opinions of bloggers. I know that with their hectic schedules of keeping up with the exhumed body of Anna Nicole Smith and its whereabouts most cable news talk show hosts don’t have time to get bogged down in anything like…maybe…uh… thinking about what they are saying but to sit there and pop-off that the election is going to be heavily influenced by bloggers seems to go beyond the Pale. I wonder what that news room conversation was like…”well we’ve beat the “mud-slinging” angle to death and there’s a few more months until we get any kind of caucus information so let’s go with this bloggers steer election angle, yeah that’s good ‘cause this Internet thing is really popular…hey how’s my hair look?”

I’ll first point out that a blog is nothing more than an online diary. “Dear diary today I got up, put on my Transformers T-shirt and made some toast and while that was toasting I cleaned out the cat’s litter box and then my toast was ready and you shouldn’t vote for Mitt Romney because of his stance on Indian casinos and his Draconian trade policy plan for Luxembourg…I’ve also attached a picture of my cat hiding in the clothes hamper and several pics of a mock battle I staged between my KISS actions figures and my Shrek doll.” Oh, so these are the people that will heavily sway the 2008 election, help!

These online diarists don’t have to back up what they write, nor should they have to because what they write is opinion not news, but NBC and other news agencies in an attempt to sound hip, genuflect at the term “blogger” and give people that barely qualify for a Blockbuster membership a channel to communicate their take on things with an international television audience and just because someone can write a few hundred words of amusing political commentary doesn’t mean that their opinions are the compass for the outcome of the 2008 election. Still either through laziness on the news agencies’ part or some kind of mid life crisis compensation on the part of news directors there is a nightly place on television for the bloggers. To galvanize my point just think about that conspiracy theorist guy in your office, he most likely has his own blog, does he strike you as a credible source or a steering force for the 2008 election?

There are blogs on everything from mashed potatoes sculptures to people who have clown fetishes to political commentary. I’m not discounting the entertainment value of any of them but I am fairly sure they won’t be steering my vote in the 2008 election. Now back to the blog farm to update my “life with Satsumas” blog. If you want to know how most citrus will vote next November you better be reading my posts.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

Archives