Lately I've been looking around at the internet and noticing how so many blogs out there seem to be merging into one soulless, vapid megablog spread throughout thousands of locations. I click on a link to a blog that seems to be well-regarded and I find myself at another list post that promises "[Number between 5 and 10] Ways to [Do Something] and Win!" And then I read the list and it turns out to be a set of ideas that could have and probably did come from the most boring page of the beginning-level OBVIOUS GUIDE TO INTRODUCTORY [TOPIC OF YOUR CHOICE]. The edition published in 1953 and written by a known dullard. And the post contains links to five to ten other posts just as vague, which all contain links to five to ten more.
Friends, I do not like this! I do not like it at all!
What is the point of this endless churning of bland gruel that passes for subject matter? Who are these people dutifully glopping out daily rations of this stuff as if it's going to feed anybody anything of nutritious value? And are we all so starving that we're going to approach the consumption of this reconstituted, lukewarm, glutinous information with any sort of appetite at all?
People of the internet, we need to fix this right now before we all get so accustomed to reading the daily non-topics that we begin to believe that they actually contain some value. Here is my proposal for keeping our minds alive:
First of all, let's give a collective yell of "FUCK BLOGGING ADVICE!" It's getting us nowhere. We can think up better advice for our own selves. We can decide what makes a fascinating post. We can be individuals with intensely weird interests. We can write down nutty thoughts of our own and arrange them by their correspondence to our deeply-held ideas on the meaning of the zodiac. We can spew extreme opinions one day and live to spew the opposite ones the next. We can each go to our wacky place or be academic or artistic or rude or anything else that gives us the giggles, and we can do it without help from so-called experts who only want to bait us in so they can get another few clicks on their blog without thinking hard or coming up with anything new. It's time to conquer the internet. By being specifically ourselves, we can get some variety going out there. We can BE INTERESTING. That's the last piece of blogging advice you or anyone else will ever need.
GOOD DAY.
I've never understood "blogging advice", and now people ask me for it. My advice? Use Wordpress - lol - and be yourself.
ReplyDeletemari concurs
DeleteThe only blogging advice I ever has is, "Spell things correctly and use paragraphs."
ReplyDeleteHell yes.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this, Nayad. Welcome and needed.
ReplyDeleteThe one unforgivable sin is to be boring. Shitty spelling and paragraphing are two of the steps on that road.
You, Nayad, have never been boring. :)
Thanks, everyone! I'm glad we're all in agreement here. :)
ReplyDeleteI for one plan to blog each Monday with a tagline from a book that's on our free table at work. Today: from the "Electrifying Bestseller ERIC VAN LUSTBADER: ZERO."
ReplyDeleteTagline: There is an evil so powerful that only the purest good can conquer it.
And the sequel: There is a dirt so powerful that only the strongest soap can conquer it. ;)
ReplyDeleteI'm guilty of writing an advice for bloggers post, although i was based mainly on my observation that more than 50% of my search driven traffic came from a single Alexander McQueen image, and those people don't stick around.
ReplyDeleteHowever, j'adore your advice about being interesting. It's a hard thing to pull off without drifting into unfocused, Facebook-mimicing random thought blogging (which quickly becomes boring).