Scrivener.net

George Orwell is blogging.

Well, his diary is being published online 70 years to the day after each entry was written.

Orwell would've been a blogger if he could've, there is little doubt. He wrote a book called "The British Pamphleteers" that traces pamphleteering back to the 1600s (covering the American revolution and all). Substitute "blog" for "phamphlet" in it and there you are...

The pamphlet is a one-man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and 'highbrow' than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals ...

Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or in verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue or a piece of 'reportage'.

All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical and short...

Orwell's diary runs to 1942, so his blog assuredly has enough material to run until 2012, which is more than the rest of us can say. A great deal of information about Orwell, including his recipies, are available at the host site of his diary/blog.

Orwell's works are available online, and his essay Politics and the English Language should be required reading for bloggers, writers generally, readers, and anybody else who lives through an election year in a country where the politicians and poltical pundits speak English.