A Singular Protest Against The Royal "We"

By london_will Last edited 223 months ago
A Singular Protest Against The Royal "We"
singularist_logo.jpg

As you will have noticed by now, we here at Londonist most often refer to ourselves with the collective "we". We are applying Gothamist editorial guidance that the Ist empire should be one of collaborative, collective blogs of like-minded individuals and not a venue for the self-obsessed vanity that is endemic across the rest of the blogosphere. Beyond that, we in London specifically are a close-knit team of friends outside the tiny window of blogging and like the collective voice.

However, it seems some people find the use of the collective voice irksome. To the extent that he has set up a site called Singularist, which uses an extremely basic bit of code to rewrite the Ist sites in the singular.

Londonist is published under a Creative Commons license, so this is entirely legal - as long as you don't profit from it, you can use our content however you please.

Chicagoist was so fascinated as to why Singularist's creator, Eric Richardson, had chosen to spend time and money creating the site, it interviewed him. The story was also picked up by our cousins in Seattle and San Francisco.

Frankly, it's free publicity, so there's no harm in it. Hooray for Eric - it's only a shame this simple prank is getting so much more attention than his other work, whatever that is.

But this whole endeavour apparently stems out of some arcane spat in Los Angeles between LAist and another collective urban blog called blogging.la. blogging.la (a fabulously original name) is the capital of the Metblogs network, which is sometimes considered to be a competitor to the Ist network. Certainly they never miss an opportunity to stew up a fight.

Anyway, it all seems really feudy and hilarious across the pond, and it seemed a pity that the British outpost of the empire should get left out of As Websites Collide. So now you can read Londonist in the singular, if that is your heart's desire. The idea that a short-lived practical joke should get so much attention is hilarious in itself.

Last Updated 03 August 2005