Although I'm far from a prolific web poster, this isn't my first web post. But it is the first one that has been officially categorized as a blog entry. Its a somewhat strange moment because I've always had a less than positive image of blogging. Seems to me an awful lot of blogging is nothing more than people getting all lathered up about something and then writing a web diatribe that provides no useful information and/or that masquerades the writer's opinions as facts.

As we all know the word "blog" comes from a combination of "web" and "log". This type of combination, according to wikipedia, is a portmanteau. Along this same line I would like to offer up a new web category: "blather" (a portmanteau of "web" and "lather"). Now when we get all worked up about something that we really don't know anything about, or that is really irrelevant in the cosmic scheme of things, rather than filling up the web with mindless blog entries, we can just blather. If you don't have a lot to say, then you can just micro-blather.

What might a person blather about? Well maybe there's a commonly used word you don't like, you could complain about that and possibly suggest a ridiculous alternative. Or maybe you hate it when people pronounce certain acronyms, eg saying G-U-I as GOOEY, or V-I as VIE. You could get all bent out of shape about these things and then just get on the web and blather about it.

What's the benefit of blathering? Well, now that real content is separated from useless content people can more effectively find what they're looking for. And when the global disk quota reaches 95%, we can just run a cron job to delete all the content marked as blather and bring it back to 40% and start again.

At this point you may be asking yourself a couple questions: First, is this guy serious? Ahhh, no not really. Second, what does all of this have to do with Linux? Ahhh, not much really, I like Linux, I use it everyday, just needed some filler.

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Mitch Frazier is the System Administrator at Linux Journal.