OPEN

Time was when “celeb X, Y or Z has started a blog!” was a staple of blogging, back in the day when we anticipated the next announcement from Technorati that the number of bloggers had doubled (er, last year).

So any “sleb” who starts  blogging right now certainly can’t be accused of going bandwagon jumping.

With two very long and very entertaining posts, Stephen Fry has launched himself into blogging.

His first post (at 6,500+ words a blog essay or blessay, in his own words rather than a post) was an extended review of smartphones (“Devices and Desires”), including the iPhone,  and his second an essay on fame (“Let Fame”).

Sample pitch perfect prose follows:

Simply in mentioning ‘Adam Sandler’ I have inflated his fame by a cubic millimetre. It will only deflate, over time, if his name is never uttered. Given his slate of disgustingly maudlin films over the last five years (with the exception of the wonderful Punch Drunk Love), I can’t help feeling that wouldn’t be a bad idea, but this is an entirely separate argument.

He’s an Apple lover, if you didn’t know that already. I’m very familiar with the ravings of Apple devotees, but few are as eloquent as Mr Fry nor as damning in their critiques of Microsoft. As someone who has been afflicted by Microsoft Mobile I did take some delight in

The HTC Touch is called (by idiots) an iPhone killer because it comes without a keyboard and makes a brief and rather feeble nod towards the idea of a strokeably operated touch-screen offering a silly cube transformation effect with big buttons. Oh, and the Touch is WinMob 6 rather than 5 (you won’t notice the difference – a quite cool coloured line fribble in the agenda which shows you which days of the week are busy is the best addition, otherwise it’s virtually indistinguishable from WM5)….

Those behind Palm OS and the Psion can justifiably be proud of what they did, what they created. WinMob just muscled in on a market they never spotted and they did it in a clumsy, bullying, ugly manner, exactly as they had with Windows before, and exactly as IBM had with the PC itself a decade earlier. Break free, all you corporate software engineers and designers: the excuse that you are under the rule of dullards, greedy share-price number crunchers and visually and ergonomically illiterate yahoos is not good enough. Persuade them. Otherwise we all get a digital environment that’s a vile as a 60s housing estate.

Geekery never sounded so good…

I’m more sceptical about iPhones than I have been for a while. But more on that soon.