Echoes of past idols
It was late last week that Dan Rubin announced his Inquirer blog, Blinq, was about to go dormant. I was unplugged for most of the weekend, so my reaction to this news was initially delayed by a lack of knowledge. Then it was further delayed by a lack of eloquence.
Dan Rubin has been one of my favorite local bloggers for the past couple years. (Actually, remove the word “local” from the previous sentence and you still have an accurate statement.) Ever since a blogger meetup in the spring of 2005, when Dan set out on his mission to understand the blogosphere by rubbing elbows with real-life bloggers, he’s shown a remarkable aptitude for the way of the blog. His journalistic expertise probably served him well in that research effort, somehow allowing him to break through the barrier that keeps many traditional journalists from grasping what bloggers do, and why what they do is important.
Sure, most of us (the bloggers) are completely irrelevant, but ignoring us altogether would certainly not bode well for the dead tree dinosaurs who are finally starting to adapt (in what I hope are meaningful ways). Dan plugged right in to the social tendencies of the interactive web and managed to build an actual blog brand. And his style has one quality all too rare in both traditional journalism and the blogosphere:
It’s actually interesting.
While it’s sad that the Inquirer seems willing to let that brand languish, Dan’s silver lining is that he’ll be moving on to write a local column, which I have to think is a good thing for him. When I had dreams of professional journalism earlier in my life, the title “columnist” is what I often dreamed of as the pinnacle. It’s a dream you can blame squarely on my fascination with Mike Royko’s work.
Coincidentally, having grown acquainted with Dan Rubin’s literary style over the past couple years, I can envision his columns striking a similar tone to the one I came to expect from Royko. Conversely, I also could have imagined Royko (had he lasted about ten years longer) striking a similar blogospheric tone to what Dan has struck with Blinq.
We’ll never get to find out about the latter, but the possibility of the former is wide open. Good luck Dan!
(Click here for the Philly Future round up of reactions to Blinq’s hibernation)
