The Tyee has a great piece on blogging today, focusing mainly on high-profile Canadian bloggers and how they’re adjusting their powermoves as novice begats veteran. One of my favourite Canadian ex-bloggers, Antonia Zerbisias, now gone from my daily diet since she ‘shut down’ her blog, comments extensively on life in the blog-jungle, and what it was like tending a commenting crowd often consisting entirely (in my estimation) of completely unruly rednecks:
Lesson two: Zerbisias has suffered bouts of blogger fatigue. Not because posting multiple times a day is gruelling, but because many of the denizens of the digital universe can be, well, a big pain in the ass sometimes. Especially in the comment threads.
“A lot of things got hijacked,” she says of her now-defunct blog. “It seemed like 10 comments in, we always ended up on Israel. It was ridiculous.”
Refusing to pull punches, Zerbisias was met with a torrent of ruthless abuse from determined attackers, the kind of stuff that went far beyond anything she’d experienced in her career as a print journalist.
“I felt like I was being targeted by certain people who just live, you know, to come and troll on certain pet peeves and certain pet topics.”
Like many, Zerbisias couldn’t refrain from replying to the crudest and most ignorant commenters. She spent hours answering all her hate mail, where she put clever ploys into action to try and irritate her attackers (like telling them the Star was paying her a nickel per response, which was of course a lie).
“I would just mock them, you know, ‘Thank-you very much for your trenchant comments…. You know, whatever.'”
A shame that the ‘tropolis so often lives down to our expectations, and a story we’ve seen many times before. Oh, and please, Antonia, may we have some more?