Internet - Zoe Williams on the embarrassing growth of self-aggrandising websites
Weblogs sound more impressive and professional than they are. This is because of the inclusion of the word "web", which works as an aggrandising suffix or prefix with almost anything (I often call myself WebWilliams if I'm feeling a little flat). In fact, they are diaries of nobodies. As such, their main constituency is bored students and, consequently, their natural writers are bleak, nihilistic layabouts, prostitutes, people pretending to be prostitutes, Dungeons and Dragons freaks and nail bombers. There should be no place in this medium for politicians, "foremost journalists", wannabe think-tankers, soi-disant serious novelists or campaigners of any sort. Even before you consider how woeful are their contributions to the World Wide Wonderweb, they are on the wrong bus. They think they're being modern by entering the modern fray, but probably the axis of modernity is understanding who should be in the fray and who shouldn't.
It would be a shame, however, to gloss over the hilarious badness of their offerings. Customarily, the home page features nice things that have been said about the author. William Shawcross is the above-mentioned "foremost journalist", according to the Irish Times. Edwina Currie has tonnes of compliments, among them this one from Anne Robinson: "She deserved to go far . . . she had ordinary people's interests at heart." Robinson only said that because they're friends. I don't know that for certain, but I can't imagine who else would be friends with either of them. Now, this is a category error. This kind of blurb usually appears on the back of printed books, where a third party, the publisher, takes responsibility for what would otherwise be the vulgar and naked trumpeting of one's own excellence. With a website, you may have a techie devoted to making your curly writing throb (and hats off, while we're here, to Edwina's IT guy for some really amusing computer-generated Vaseline), but it's your baby - you wrote it, you posted it. Including these plaudits is like going round saying: "Guess what the Liverpool Echo said about me! They said I was great! And really clever! And that, whatever you might think about me, my heart was in the right place!" If you wouldn't do it at a party, in other words, don't do it on your website.
Perhaps I could offer some friendly advice to Ann Widdecombe - draw a graph of people who you think care what your view is on crime, then cross-section it with a graph of people who want to see a picture of your cats. Take a long, hard look at that cross-section: if you think there's anyone on it, you are mad. Currie is the honourable exception, here. She talks of her erstwhile political career in a vague, hand-wavy manner, pausing only on a couple of issues such as her sterling work promoting cancer screenings for women. Charmingly, this brings to any interested person's mind the time, donkey's years ago, that she went on Woman's Hour to talk about cervical screening and said to Jenni Murray: "Well, of course it doesn't apply to people like me, I've been married for 17 years." Married, yes, but what about John Major? I call her honourable only because a grim smile is better, by a country mile, than no smile at all. You won't get any smiles off the Widdy Web.
The meat of the blog, with politicians at least, is speeches they have recently given in parliament and around and about. Tom Watson, the House's first blogger, includes every single article in which he gets a mention. Again, some basic logic could have been applied in the early stages; anyone interested in these offerings could refer to Hansard at any time, or visit the British Library (I suspect that said interested person crawled into the British Library and died some time ago, which is what that funny smell is).
Journalists and broadcasters, likewise, give us articles that we could have read in newspapers. I suppose, in some tiny universe, it's useful to have the collected works of Melanie Phillips or Peter Tatchell all in one place; probably two other journalists looking to do a profile on them and find a second-hand Le Creuset on eBay at the same time have thanked their lucky stars. But again, this anthologising should be undertaken by a third party. To do it yourself is like awarding yourself a lifetime achievement award, named after yourself, with yourself providing the prize money to yourself, sending out too many invites to the award ceremony and not providing any free champagne.
I think the best example of graphic self-love is provided by Jeanette Winterson. Writing about her attendance at the Hay-on-Wye festival, she launches a paragraph bitching about her busy life and poor hotel facilities with this sen-tence: "With Lighthousekeeping finally launched, I find myself with a sore throat and exhaustion." I always thought the whole point of novelists was that, if nothing else, they knew what words were for. The only person on God's earth who should have to listen to how tired you are is your spouse, and that's on the understanding that they've zoned out and are thinking about the garden.
A runner-up in the business of ego is an inconsequential Blairite named Paul Richards, who has the brass neck to call his site "The Thinker". The blog has been suspended; I think something bad might have happened to him and I'll wind up feeling guilty about this tirade. But sod it. And Joan Collins demonstrates some bottomless self-love in joancollins.net; her politics have the joyful, playground idiocy of an Enid Blyton romp. I am actually rather glad she exists.
It's all vanity publishing, but with the added vanity of not realising that's what it is, since it's not printed on paper. Let's call it vanity-vanity publishing, or meta-vanity publishing. Or please, please stop it.
Zoe Williams is a columnist for the Guardian
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