It seems as if the realm of the literary blog is already beginning to diverge. There are the so called “literary blogs” that discuss reading and writing, and then there are the ones that serve promotional purposes for a struggling writer, the so-called “author website“. Need I bother to mention that I prefer the former to the later?

In recent discussion of this diversion, a few of the problems have already been pointed out. Some of the marketing strategies employed by an “author website” can be questionable, such as the one where a webring of book reviews is established by a group of writers helping each other, leading to questionable reviewing practices. Proprietors of the marketing machinery, begging for advertising space, can bother the literary weblogs’ readers and writers. Need I bother mention that an advertisers worldview is bunk?

To combat the growing divide between literary web logs and marketing garbage, I would like to see a respectable list somewhere of the blogs that have yet to succumb to the “Buzz, Balls & Hype” What I really want to read is something literary: notes on reading, writing, etc. and not something commercial.