I'm entering the final phase of the writing process in regards to my weblog paper. I'm five pages shy of reaching the 60 page minimum and I haven't written a conclusion yet, so meeting the requirement shouldn't be a problem. However, there is still some stuff I want to add and I'm sure I still need to do a lot of rewrites, but suddenly handing it in on October 1st doesn't look impossible anymore.

While working on my paper I've done a lot of research, read a lot of weblogs and a lot of articles, and I feel like I've learned a lot about why other people read and write weblogs. But there's one thing that I've thought about for a while. I claim in my paper that weblog publishing by nature is a dynamic media. By that I mean you can update them quickly from anywhere in the world and if they aren't updated on a regular basis they cease to be relevant. A lot of people seem to enjoy that they're able to quickly published brief entries with observations and links and the prize you pay for this as a reader is that weblogs often are filled with dead links and spelling errors.

During a conference recently author David Weinberger said:

"As rhetoric, I think it's important that many Weblogs are written badly. When reading a Weblog, you assume that you're reading a first draft. You know that it wasn't carefully edited, not much spell checked. You have the sense, wrongly, that it's closer to the person who wrote. Second of all, by reading what you assume to be a first draft, Weblog readers tend to be forgiving. You have to forgive the broken link. You have to forgive the bad spelling. You have to forgive the fact that the second paragraph should really be the lead. Social forgiveness is not a bad characteristic."

People who know me won't be surprised to learn that I'm rarely that forgiving.

Now, I think it's brilliant that you can publish your entries really fast and get your thoughts out there as quickly as possible. But would it kill you to go back and reread what you've just broadcasted to the entire world? How busy are you that you can't check if the link to your favourite gerbil page is working?

When I started blogging I used Blogger, whose tagline is "Push-button publishing for the people". I consider whatever is written on a weblog something which is published (meaning it should be able to withstand the same scrutiny as any book or newspaper) and therefore I like to think of my entries as (small) articles. This means even though my entries on occasion are filled with irony, slang, rubbish, and lies I try to take each entry as seriously as I would an article I was paid to write.
This doesn't always happen, but generally I check the spelling, edit, and reread everything which goes up here. Therefore I find it hard to accept that weblogs should generally just be considered first drafts and obviously this also means I get annoyed when people publish entries full of mistakes and broken links in the same way I get annoyed when I find mistakes in a newspaper or in subtitles.

Obviously mistakes happen and I’m sure you’d be able to find several errors in my entries as well. But my point is I think that if you want to be taken seriously by your readers you need to spend a bit more time writing coherently and do a bit of editing. But if you think I’m wrong let me know. Are broken links and spelling errors an integrated part of weblogs that we shouldn’t try to do anything about? Or would it be helpful to us both as readers, but also as a community if everyone spent an extra two minutes on each entry to weed out the worst mistakes?