The Blooker Prize: Small Pieces, Partially Digested

Right. Who flarted?

Letters More than half of you who responded to our news of The Blooker Prize suggested that we'd made it all up. Surely no one could produce such drivel?

Sorry, it's true - and even as I write, people are vigorously debating who should take the credit for coining the word "blook" - which is a book of a blog, and "flook" - which is a film of the book of a blog.

What the fluck is all this, you ask?

Hmmm... fascinating. I wonder when the first blook blurning festival will be? Hopefully six months from now, hosted by the plublishers and complete with live effigies… please?

Seik

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Good god.

Hear that sucking sound? That's the sound of the entire blogging community disappearing up it's own collective arse.

Now, I'm not a specialist in such things, but isn't a floock a kind of parasitic worm? How appropriate.

Thank you for publishing that, it has cheered me up no end.

Paul Leader

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And the final point of all this emerging turgescence is : the blash. The blash is the final resting area of all these blooks and flooks, and bhacks and bleaders - situated right under the pilum which mashes it all to a pulp before conveying it to the furnace where it belongs.

In any case, I salute the official creation of blooks and flooks. That's two areas I will know I can safely avoid wasting my time in, as there will be nothing there that has any chance of being more valuable than the rantings of my neighbor.

It's likely going to take a lot of time, but one day the general public will come around to understanding that the availability of an abundance of personal views does not replace the publications of the informed few. Of course, that won't happen before those who call themselves journalists start actually doing their job instead of running the stories that are dictated to them by the powers that be.

Pascal Monnet

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OK, I've finished blarfing now. Since it's a prize for books based on websites, the winner is clear: Any of the BOFH books. It's quite entertaining imagining the acceptance speech the BOFH and PFY would come up with.

Erik

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Oh good Lord.

Screw the typography, the sentiment here is making me roll my eyes.

And "a contemporary, magic realist novel about wireless networking" made me shiver, although to be fair I haven't actually read the book so perhaps it's a timeless classic that I've judged harshly and unfairly by its description.

Paul

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Good work with "Will you blother reading a bloring blook?"! Thanks for bringing it to light, twas very funny. It made me wonder why i even bother reading boingboing... they don't even have black helicopters.

Dan Williams

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Thanks for the article regarding blooks. I was left rather queasy by the ideas in the article. Not so much the replacement of curling up with a book by sitting in an uncomfortable chair in front of a computer.

It was the thought of these New-Age salesmen fresh from the car-yards trying to sell us a new social technology that no one wants or needs which causes my bile to overflow.

Thankfully due to the Register's incisive cynicism I was able to hold on to my dinner. Thanks chaps.

Andrew Punch

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Glad to be of service.

What's behind this latest garbage is the notion of a "collective intelligence", where the "hive mind" of the Interweb will enhance and improve an idea or piece of writing. That depends on who's reading of course - and some writing evidently starts its journey through the hive mind's neurons in such a terrible state that nothing can improve it. Take heed, as the idea underpins a great deal of today's techno utopian rhetoric: but it's really the sound of someone farting in a Californian hot tub. Which to date, has been an endless source of bubbles.

Finally, we draw your attention to research conducted in over thirty countries which looked at "problem-solving deficit disorder". The study of 100,000 children concluded that computer use had a deleterious effect on literacy. But I bet you didn't know how much. I didn't. ®