Barista Uno at the Marine Café Blog shares his perspective on ” downside and upside, the agony and joy, of maritime blogging.”
Confessions of a maritime blogger
The Marine Café Blog was launched in late August of 2009, succeeding the old Marine Café news website. This makes bllogging a fairly new game for us, although we were into international maritime journalism long before some of the manning fellas in Manila became rich and started driving around town in Mitsubishi Pajeros and Ford Expeditions. Seven months is a short time but enough for us to see the downside and upside, the agony and joy, of maritime blogging.
One problem with blogging in general is that there are, by some estimates, tens of millions of blog sites worldwide. This leads to a paradox. Whilst blogging allows for a more subjective and casual style of writing, a blogger becomes, in a sense, part of the great anonymous mass. The Internet is a vast democratic arena. The phenomenon known as blogging has made it even more so, transforming the World Wide Web into a sort of free-for-all, a cacophony of voices – some making sense, others not. Which leads to a logical question: who really cares what one individual feels and thinks and posts in the Internet?
Sometimes it can be frustrating. Many Filipino maritime executives, for instance, have yet to adapt to the Internet culture and use the Web as an information tool. Some do not even bother to check their email on a regular basis; what more for reading online articles that concern the industry? A Filipino Shipowners Association official once remarked that one could have ‘information overload’ from the Internet, which was the reason he gave for not visiting the old Marine Café website. That sounds silly: unless one is suffering from intellectual underload, the human brain has an infinite capacity for absorbing and processing information.
A little less dismaying is the failure of some to see the difference between blogging and journalism. Blogging by definition is subjective, whereas journalism is or ought to be objective (thus the journalistic stricture on ‘factual reporting’). This implies that the usual standards of objectivity and fairness (e.g., the rule on getting information from more than one source) cannot be strictly applied to bloggers, who are understood to be freely expressing their own opinions. On the other hand, it does not mean a blogger can sully other people’s reputations; nobody has the right to do so.
One other fact we’ve learned is that there aren’t, relatively speaking, too many maritime blog sites. Apparently, most people with any serious interest or involvement in the maritime industry don’t feel a need to blog about their views on the business. The industry is a source of livelihood, not a fulcrum for ruminating or intellectualising. Blogging is definitely not a path to riches, although many bloggers derive good income from Google ads (Google pays the blogger a very miniscule sum each time a visitor clicks on a Google ad link). Others subsist on donations to keep their sites going.
We’re not surprised at all to find that some maritime bloggers are old sea dogs – maybe a retired ship captain or a coast guard commander who is living on a pension or has some other source of income. Such individuals not only have the time but the urge to express themselves. For them, it is the sense of gratification from being able to share their thoughts and experiences with humankind at large that matters. It is the psychological income, ludicrous as it may sound, that counts. ~Barista Uno