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Tuesday, February 20, 2007
How Not To Blog
A Primer Born Out of Many Years Experience Blogging
Don't Blog. Seriously, don't. Blogging has been called the CB-radio of the 21st century. That's being far too generous. It's also been compared to publishing a zine. That's simply stupid. Blogging is the pet rock of the 21st century. Inherently stupid, probably a scam, and the people who fall for it should really know better. Let's face it, ten years from now, a bald and fat Dane Cook will be on VH-1's latest talking-head nostalgia exploiting reality program talking about how everyone thought blogging was cool and everyone had a blog and then just as suddenly everyone came to their senses and got on with their lives. When your significant other asks, all innocence, if you ever had a blog, do you really want to admit to it?
Don't Link to Other Blogs. A link to another blog is a tacit endorsement of that blog's content. Think carefully about the content you've seen on other blogs. Do you really want to be associated with...that? I don't think so.
Don't Pay Attention to Your Incoming Traffic. This is very tempting, but it should always be avoided. Blogging, by its nature, is a very egotistical act, so you'll want to see who is sending readers your way. You'll want to know who thinks you're a genius. What you will discover, almost every single time, is that the people sending you readers are idiots or assholes or both. Idiots and assholes and idiot assholes like your blog. That means you suck.
Don't Host Your Own Images. Some pipsqueak on MySpace will just hot-link them.
Don't Ever Review Anything. It's not worth the hassle or the challenges to your taste or ethics. If you buy your own materials to review, you're just a fanboi, so you can be safely ignored. If you are sent materials to review by publishers or distributors, then your opinion can be ignored since you only give things good reviews to keep the free loot coming in. And if you ever have the nerve to give anything a bad review, well, you're probably just a bitter crank who doesn't get it!
Don't Linkbait. In other words, don't put up posts just to get people to link to you and talk about you. There are various ways to go about this, all of them a bad idea. You could blog about things you don't like, but that would just be sad. Or you could start a blog tracking discrimination in popular entertainments, but reveal yourself to be a xenophobic, racist, homophobic religious supremacist with every post. You could even make a habit of going out of your way to deliberately provoke other bloggers, because a good flame-war increases hit counts on all sides. The ultimate expression of this would be simply to start a blog linking to other blogs. But no one would be mad enough to do that.
Don't Allow Comments on Your Posts. The only thing remotely sadder than a blog writer is a blog reader. Do you really want validation so badly that you are willing to put up with the inevitable trolls and sycophants?
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