Found this lament from some blogger in Canada.
What's the lesser of two evils: Bad blogs, or blogging about bad blogs?
Slice:
Have you seen some of these blogs? Granted, the owners have invested the time (or, in some cases, money) to create a flashy banner, a kick-ass title graphic, and an eye-catching color theme, something I have never been able to get around to myself. So, as each page pops up, you are teased with the unspoken promise of greatness. But what do you get?
Drivel.
End slice:
I say, back at you brother.
Blog on.
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6 comments:
Bad Bob's Bad BlogMost blogs are ''bad'' because most everything is ''bad.'' Of the 40-80k books published each year, most are remaindered or pulped. Most TV shows are bad, think of the time and money spent on them.
Blogging per se is bad.
Part of the reason is that most people aren't that interesting. They don't lead interesting lives. They don't think interesting thoughts. They aren't even good liars, that is, their fantasy life isn't that interesting either.
Blogging meets story telling with the need to tell a story but without having a story to tell. Newspaper reporters may work on a story for months before publication but the paper gets out every day. Bloggers have to publish daily, or almost daily, or their readers go away looking for the fresh story. The demands of blogging's publication schedule exceed the capacity of one person to generate new content.
The rest of the reason? Blogging software is bad. In other words, it isn't the blogger's fault. Unless, of course, the blogger has his own .COM and controls the blogging software.
What's wrong with most blogs is that they relegate Commentors to second class status. Comments do not appear on page one. Good blogging software would share page one with Comments. ''Permission to speak, Sir!'' won't fly. People prepared to leave good Comments go off and start their own blog. Bad blogging software fractionates the intelligent community that might otherwise support a blog.
Another fault of blogging software is that the commentary is not threaded. Threads are lost. There's no reason that a thread cannot continue for years between commentors even after the blogger himself has lost all interest in it. Similarly, blogging software doesn't permit a Commentor to originate at new thread. ''Hey, wait a minute, this is my blog!'' won't cut it. That interesting person with an interesting new comment will go away, forced to start his own blog. After that, he won't be reading yours. This is a net loss to your blog.
Blogging software's premise is one man on a soapbox and an anonymous crowd throwing tomatoes. The tomato throwers never get a chance to stand on the soapbox.
The other problem with blogs relates to absolute number of them and the inability to read more than a limited subset, and the fact that the bogger's topic changes daily (no threaded conversations!). A reader goes to a blog that was interesting yesterday and finds that the subject has changed. Here's where the Picture-of-my-dinner-plate blog has something to offer, at least that topic hasn't changed! Dinner-plate pictures are a sort of static webcam.
There are many other problems with blogging software than the ones described.
What can a blogger do? Stay up 24 hours working on the blog to keep it interesting? Set up a .COM and write better software so interesting Commentors are permitted a forum. (Become a service for others, people who might be more interesting than oneself. Not many bloggers are that altruistic.)
The simple solution is write daily, edit more, and publish less frequently. Create a blog named ''3rd Tuesday,'' write and edit for a month and post on the the 3rd Tuesday. There are tons of interesting and good writers online, but they can't be interesting and good every day. What the blog world needs most is editing.
Ouch.
Q.E.D. Writing about bad blogs is worse. Bad blogs exist. You can't stop people from writing them. It is relatively inexpensive to post your dinner plate once you have made the initial outlay for internet connectivity, etc...
Your choice to write [toss tomatos] is purely your own. No need to do so. If a person doesn't want to comment on your page, you can't stop them from not writing.
Wow... You've really put a lot of thought into this, haven't you?
Sorry to hear it...
Forums, bulletin board format
RotoGuru forums, bbs-like discussion found on DeadParrots a link on JustOneMinute.
Dear cupojoe,
No, I was really writing off the cuff on this one. Just my thoughts. Have you read the rest of my blog? If you do, you will find that I am interested in many topics. I see that I don't have as many comments on my pages as you do, but hey, I don't think that there is a direct correlation between the number of comments and a high quality blog.
"To thine own self be true..."
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