Authenticity Watch: Slow Blogging

This piece from the Sunday NYTimes has an extremely dorky first half, while the second half is actually a very insightful look at the ratcheting up of demands from blogging and twittering. 

First, the dork, and the non-surprise:

…slow bloggers believe that news-driven blogs like TechCrunch and Gawker are the equivalent of fast food restaurants — great for occasional consumption, but not enough to guarantee human sustenance over the longer haul. A Slow Blog Manifesto, written in 2006 by Todd Sieling, a technology consultant from Vancouver, British Columbia, laid out the movement’s tenets.

But at the same time, there is an undeniable downside with blogging, when it becomes an addiction for both the blogger and the reader:

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor at the University of Virginia, shuttered his popular blog, Sivacracy, in September, in part because he was exhausted by the demands. “When you run your own blog, there’s a lot of imaginary pressure to publish constantly, to be witty, to be good, and nobody can live with that,” he said in an interview.

My surprisingly retro take on this appears in this week’s magazine.  On newsstands Thursday.