Leah McLaren decides to permanently check out of checking out the blogosphere after doing a Technorati search on herself and several other writers she admires and finding a world of hate, envy and -- worst of all -- bad spelling out there.

An excerpt from her Globe and Mail article:

The results of my search were grim: countless chat rooms full of bitter unpublished writers venomously slagging published ones -- their terrible spelling, poorly constructed sentences and outrageous amounts of displaced hatred and envy a testimony to why they became bloggers in the first place. ...

My own problem with the blogosphere is not that it's selling out to the mainstream, but that most of it is spectacularly boring. The dominant quality is tedium: writers without editors, fact-checkers or paying subscribers to keep them in check. As Butterworth succinctly puts it: "If the pornography of opinion doesn't leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium."

Why then, other than hearing the sound of his own voice unfettered by editorial nips and tucks, does the blogger blog? One tempting explanation is that what a blogger has to say is unfit for publication. This is usually true. Much like teachers who teach because they can't do, the blogger blogs because he can't publish.

Hmmm. So most bloggers are boring dweebs who can't put two sentences together and would starve to death if they had to do it for a living. But surely McLaren found at least one blog out of 28 million that's worth reading?

But this doesn't hold up in all cases. Take my friend and peer David Eddie. A Toronto-based novelist, journalist and screenwriter, Eddie maintains a blog at http://www.davideddie.com even though he invariably has several other professional writing projects on the go. When I ask him (slightly incredulously) why on Earth he would bother to write down his opinions for free, he shrugs.

"It's a good way to limber up. You get up in the morning, fire up a blog, write the thing in 15 minutes and then you know what's on your mind. I think it was Nabokov who said, 'How do I know what's on my mind until I write it down?' "

Eddie's blog is whimsical and soul-searching, devoid of all the self-serving spitefulness of many other whiners in the sphere. I find myself checking it just to see what he's thinking. The beauty of the blog, as he points out, is that it's informal and free-flowing, as opposed to formal journalism, which can be stilted. For established writers then, the attraction is creativity.

Please. Read Mr. Eddie's blog and tell me if you think it's among the creme de la creme of Canadian blogs.

I went into the blogosphere to track down all the sub-literate McLaren haters, and I didn't find what I consider to be an unreasonable amount of mean-spirited vitriol towards the giant, sensitive talent.

Take this from Because I Said So:

I will fully admit that the green-eyed monster doth mock when it comes to Leah. She has the job I want: she writes a column in a national newspaper AND she found a publisher for her book. Some have argued that nepotism got her the column and the column got her the book deal. They must be bitter...

Or this from Up in Ontario:

But let's get something out of the way right now. I'm not going join the pile on to slag McLaren. Sure her column in the Globe and Mail is sometimes / reliably inane. Sometimes it's about the strife her toenails have endured. She plays up her ditzy persona, immersed in the dumb washcycle of consumerism and media, and others have pointed out that her name rhymes with intellectually barren, but I think she's smarter than all that. In some ways she is to Canadian columnists as Belinda Stronach is to MPs. She's pretty so she can't be smart. Her success came to fast for her to have earned it. She's getting attention that she doesn't deserve. Cut her down!

This was a bit meaner, from My Own Private Book Club:

 She's been called the "Vanilla Ice of journalism"*. Nepotism got her a sinecure at The Globe and Mail and now she's written a book. Ryan Bigge pulls no punches in his review of the despicably vacuous Leah McLaren's "Continuity Girl":

* Brainflash: The chorus to Leah's big hit:

"Trite, trite, baby!"

(An attempt to play off "Ice, Ice, baby"; it seemed funnier before I wrote it down.)

I don't know how far McLaren went into the Technorati search results, but the main thing I found was that yes, people are envious of the cushy gig she walked into, and that no one seems to have much good to say about her first novel The Continuity Girl (TCG).

While it might be full of cruel, vapid and tedious opinions, the blogosphere is very democratic in terms of being a bastion of free speech. If you love TCG, you can say so on your blog. If you hate it, you can say that too.

Most people don't seem to hate TCG -- which I doubt many have read -- as they much as they hate the McLaren persona that radiates from the Globe's style pages (I doubt many of them have ever met her in person. I haven't).

But I suspect that McLaren's right when she talks about many of her detractors being motivated by jealousy. People in journalism seem to be much more vitriolic towards her than people outside the craft.

However, most young writers aren't fortunate enough to have a mom working at The Globe and Mail when they're looking for a first gig, and as in any field of endeavour, connections count in getting started. I don't know if McLaren has ever acknowledged in her writings that she may be a bit luckier than some of the little people she likes to dump on -- or whether her own writing has been improved by having professional editors going over her copy.

(Afterthought:

I did find this in an online chat McLaren did about her book:

Paul Ljucovic from Uxbridge Canada writes: Hi Leah, Getting picked up by a publisher is fantastically difficult for a previously unpublished writer. Aside from writing a great novel, what helped you sell your story?

Leah McLaren: Paul, see above. A great agent and being a newspaper columnist by trade. Without those two things my book would have been a much harder sell.)

In that same vein, however, while her detractors might hate her for that head start, McLaren has had the column for at least seven or eight years, and I doubt the Globe would keep her around that long if she didn't have solid following. Personally, I liked her film reviews and occasional feature articles.

Anyways, back to blogging.

While I've never believed the blogosphere would supplant the mainstream media, I'm still rather confused by some of McLaren's references. Take this:

I might check out some American and Canadian political/media blogs (Wonkette, Daily Kos, Paul Wells, Andrew Coyne) before moving on to more "established" information sources.

Daily Kos might be the only one that qualifies as an alternative source; Marcos Moulitsas Zuniga, a lawyer and political activist, built it up. Wonkette is a corporate political gossip blog. Paul Wells is an established political columnist currently toiling for Maclean's magazine. Coyne is a long-time political columnist currently with the National Post. Being a columnist for the N-P or Maclean's is pretty established.

Vanity Fair running a picture of celebrity bloggers from the Gawker empire is not symbolic of the underground becoming mainstream; it's minor corporate media figures blossoming for a short time as minor celebrity figures.

McLaren talks about a Feb. 17 article from the Financial Times' Trevor Butterworth on the blogosphere, which is something I'd recommend for all interested in this topic.

Again, that article is flawed because it's premised on the notion that blogs would supplant the mainstream media, which is goofy.

I've always liked the definition of blogging offered by Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine: Blogs are the voices of citizens in conversation.

Some of those conversations are going to be mundane, and some are going to be fabulous.

Fortunately for McLaren, she appears to be living in a world where every conversation is a non-stop whirlwind of trenchant insights and witty bon mots (name the Simpsons reference!). But one observation that always stuck with me from Janet Malcom's 1990 book The Journalist and The Murderer is that most people don't lead self-novelizing lives.

Here's the crux of why she won't waste any more time on the blogosphere:

As Choire Sicha, formerly of Gawker and now a senior editor at the New York Observer, told the Financial Times, the democratic promise of blogs has produced more fragmentation at a time when seeing the bigger picture is much more important.

"The word blogosphere has no meaning," he said. "There is no sphere; these people aren't connected; they don't have anything to do with each other. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire-service feeds."

Quick question: Is Choire even vaguely aware of how much wire copy goes into newspapers?

One last time: Blogs are the voices of citizens in conversation. They are another way for citizens to publicly work through the events and issues affecting their society -- or to have a one-way conversation about nothing.

Myself, I like to think about the blogoverse, or blogiverse (someone really needs to think through the taxonomy of blogs).

There are vast areas of the blogiverse to which I will never venture. There might be great blogs on knitting, or xeriscaping or shoe shopping or whatever, but I have no interest in those topics, so for me, they might as well not exist.

On areas where I do care, you can identify blogospheres for something like Canadian politics, and you could further identify sub-spheres within that sphere (Blogging Tories, Liblogs, Blogging Dippers, etc.). And within those small groupings, people can discuss each other's arguments on a particular issue. Some group blogs allow people to give a thumbs-up or down on particular posting.

That's what they're best at, IMO: Blogs are great micro-mediums.

As the technology improves, we'll see blogs develop more into a truly networked form of intelligence and feedback which can instantaneously link evolving conversations from across spheres. That would be a good thing. In previous postings and other forums, I've fretted about how the blog communities tend to build amongst the like-minded, and this stifles real debate.

Blogs are a new medium, and I suspect some of these problems will be resolved over time. As old problems with them are solved, new ones will likely crop up.

It's too bad Leah McLaren won't be around to see it evolve, but I guess she'll be keeping her toes wet by monitoring blogs about badly dressed celebrities.

Whatever. It's a free country.