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Your blog's great, but can it buy me a beer?

It takes a lot to make me rethink my place in New York City and even more to make me question my very existence. But, lately, irrational social fears are keeping me up at night. Something is going horribly wrong, and I have finally identified the problem: blogs.

Or, more specifically, the Blogosphere -- a land where the smart get smarter, the connected get even more connected, and the losers go home. The Godfather here is Nick Denton, owner of Gawker Media, a top-tier blog conglomerate named for its flagship, Gawker.com. Launched in January 2003, with Elizabeth Spiers as editor, Gawker made its name by skewering New York media culture -- What are the funny signs up in the bathroom at Condé Nast, the publishing conglomerate that puts out glamorous magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair, and GQ? Who was spotted going into the Condé Nast building wearing something awful? -- but Spiers lost her indie cred when she moved on to the New York magazine-owned The Kicker and started blogging about how she parties with the very people she used to skewer. Other sites under the Gawker umbrella are Wonkette.com (Gawker for D.C.), Gizmodo.com (Gawker for technogeeks), and Fleshbot.com (Gawker for porn).

A step down from Denton's cabal are countless blogs independently run by people sitting in their bedrooms. Here you're less likely to find breaking news about media culture, but you will learn a lot about the drinking patterns of articulate twentysomethings. They're all friends, the bloggers on this level, and they're in a constant state of link-swapping, making it possible to actually click through the Web in a giant circle all day, like Tigger bouncing through the Hundred Acre Wood.

I don't know all of this because I am a blogger. I know it because my friends are, and now everything is bad. And while a lot has been made of the cultural implications of the Blogosphere, I am not convinced that anyone has taken the time to talk openly and honestly about the effects it is having on the day-to-day existence of the world's adult non-bloggers, or what I like to call How Blogs Are Ruining My Life.

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