I’m new to the so-called blogosphere. And I hate it. I never wanted my site to be confused with a blog (though now you can find it listed at blogcatalog.com – despite their early refusal to accept it). The mockoblog is to the blog what Terminator 2 is to the first animal + weapon + hunter scratched on a cave wall by our ancestors: no better, no worse thing, just so bloody different!
Blogs have been around for quite some time now, not as long as I have been, but long enough for me to not read them at all until I started to write the mockoblog.
I’ve been doing my homework and this is what I found:
- Blogs are stupidly boring and amazingly superficial.
- People write blogs because they have nothing to say but this silence of their mind sounds better when some audience is around.
- There was/is actually an older term for blog and that is the diary (journal), the only two problems with this one being that you normally need some paper and a quill and that you are supposed to keep it to yourself, tucked under your pillow at least for a while. I cannot imagine a book printed after the death of an author and called “The Secret Blog of Mr. Jack the Ripper” while “The Unearthed Journal of a Certain Jack” makes more publishing sense.
- There are good blogs, but they must have two features: they are very specific (normally technical stuff) and they do not reach a large audience (for the same reason), which means that they are no blogs at all anyway.
- There are many blogs that relate to something that should never be spoken outside a private conversation because they certainly do not make the object of interest for anyone outside that conversation. Unfortunately these blogs are the bulk of the lot and the sillier they are, the more they get promoted because we, the readers, are as silly as you can imagine. There is no handy example for this kind of blog: 99% of all blogs are part of this category. Imagine: I write about how I burned my pancakes and you read it! Who’s stupid? Or imagine: you write about how you lost 12 ponds in a fortnight just to put it back again the following weekend! Who’s the dumbest?
- CONCLUSION: Blogs are Internet pollution. They should be banned or at least the authors should be charged about $1 per word and the readers should pay an access fee of at least $5 per letter to be allowed to even click on them. That would teach them both! (I think all the proceedings should go straight to the big corporates that are spending so much $$$ anyway. Perhaps Google and Microsoft should create a joint venture called Goosoft or Microgle and this entity should police thye proper usage of blogging across the human and robot worlds.)
Just in case you write a blog, here’s my advice:
a) Get a pen and a piece of paper;
b) Throw these old tools away as you won’t need them with your computer anyway;
c) Buy the latest laptop and make sure it’s got all the wireless technology in it (I use a smart phone, which is smaller and far more mobile than a laptop PC or IBook, needs less battery power and can also call an emergency number).
d) Get a good and reliable Internet connection (but also browse for free ones when you’re in the area).
e) Start writing. (That’s the tricky part and it doesn’t always work straight away, so start experiencing something first and make it worth writing about).
f) Problems? Try again!
g) Once you start writing just be carful that the more you do it, the worse it’ll get, so chill: no writing is better than a lot of.
h) Look at you PC screen, divide it in two with a horizontal line, and take 15% off the top and about 12% off the bottom, measure what’s left in the middle: that’s the height of what people may read. Now you have the length of your post.
i) Never post things that are bigger than the eyes can see at a glance. Apply step (h) to width as well but if you have a wide screen monitor, consider that some people may not.
j) Don’t post too often. What often means? Say you are a chef desperate to find some Guinea Pigs for his latest recipe: post every time you need to conduct a low budget experiment with volunteers. Say you are a movie star aged 24 and you target an audience of 50+, mostly opposite sex: post once every generation.
The Rule of Thumb for Blogging is: look at you, then look at you in the mirror: the one who looks smarter is more deceiving, so he/she should write the blog ‘cause the other one will surely read it.
