Cory Doctorow posted this link to an MP3 of Maciej Ceglowski parodying audioblogs. My capsule review - cute in a full of shit, stacked-deck-argument sort of way. He did get all the tropes in this new medium in there pretty well, but his arguments are ludicrous. The "we don't need this, we already have another way to do it" is the utility infielder of rhetorical devices, always waiting to be used against something new. Textual weblogs are a former recipient of this device but tag, audioblogs, you're it! He also calls recording audioblogs "self-indulgent", which also used to be the criticism against text blogs. Tag! Trying new things is to be discouraged, so knock it off.

I had been enjoying listening to audioblogs and enjoying creating audioblogs. From the feedback I was getting, other people had been enjoying listening to mine as well. Little did we all suspect, we're all a pack of dumbasses and shouldn't all be enjoying this. If we were all literate, we'd be writing all this down. Maciej actually says that, instead of recording audioblogs we should be focusing on writing better. It's hard to tell how much of that is sincere and how much is trolling. I'm assuming that mostly it is the latter. If you don't like them, how fricking hard is it to not listen to them?

Update: Here is a link to some of Maciej's paintings. I'm not sure why he thinks this rich media makes his website more interesting. If he were more literate, he would work on writing better descriptions of those scenes instead of wasting his time painting them. After all, "the internet was built on text," right?

Update #2: I see the genesis of the manifesto in this comment that Maciej left on Suw Charman's weblog. People tell me that he meant the manifesto ironically, but he's saying the same thing here and it seems straight up.