Blogs are shallow and hard to find

What I've learned this afternoon is that a blog is a shallow, vapid medium. It's for people trained-up to have electronically-induced attention deficit; it is the textual equivalent of a bunch of sound bites. (I don't think the medium worthless, for all that; let me think this out.)

We are used to thinking of the written media as by their nature dissuading flat-out lying, ad hominem attacks, ideological handwaving, and bloviation of all sorts. My sense is that blogs really reward these shenanigans. That is to say, their essential nature rewards crazy discourse. But how so? I don't totally get it yet.

Well, for one simple thing, because it is a short text indexed in a computer, filling your little text full of hot words is rewarded with eyeballs of some sort. For another, it moves so fast that some sort of chain of accountability is hard to keep. People tend to trust their "smell test", but that is simply often no good, even if one is a pretty sensitive reader; a crooked blogger may be gifted with a very good ear. There's no little dance of validation such as in Wikipedia or Slashdot. (I am a huge fan of both of these.)

A medium that rewards crazy discourse is intrinsically an artistic medium; or: any communication medium can be an artistic medium. So there should be a very few truly elegant and beautiful blogs. But how do we find such things?

Which brings us to the un-search-for-ability issue. Some of that is a plank in my eye; you can't do a keyword search for "a rewarding blog to read" that takes into account your world view and so on. Further, you are likely to have a hidden requirements list, that may be hidden from you as well.

The other matter is how the blog exposes search terms. I know there's an exact answer to this, but how do I set meta tags, or do I at all? Is this part of the hit I take for using free hosting? I'm still bumfuzzled by these matters.