When I logged in to the Library Society of the World room today, people were talking about Michael Gorman’s blog posts.

I thought I had logged into an alternate dimension by mistake.

But no, wonder of wonders, Michael “Revenge of the Blog People” Gorman is blogging: Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason, Part I and part II.

It gets even weirder, as he is blogging for Encyclopedia Britannica. Which, as I noted at LSW, is rather like driving a Ford truck for a buggy whip manufacturer.

I have a hard time writing about Gorman without cursing, but I’ll try and keep it clean here. I just don’t understand why he feels the need to write about the web at all. He has the beginnings of interesting, useful critiques, but he so obviously dislikes darn near everything about the web and the people who like the web. It seems like he can’t bring himself to actually try and understand anything about the web, leaving him to fall back on platitudes and his own blowhardiness, usually insulting people in the process. As Jessamyn says, “I don’t understand why he has to be that way.”

I don’t want to be that way. Gorman brings out some of the worst in me–my own self-righteousness and crummy Photoshop skills to name two things–so I’ll stop here (throwing away a perfectly awful Gorman-Cartman mashup in the process; we are all better off for it). Besides, I think the trackbacks might just encourage him.