The Blogging Machine
I have been busily browsing the big, bloated blogosphere.
At the risk of seriously harming whatever newborn karma the blogging gods have allowed me, I just wanted to uncork the bottle and let my feelings out. What I'm learning in my first baby steps into the blogging universe is that there is an incredible, astounding, utterly planet-sized pile of blogging crap out there.
How did I find out this essential, earth-shattering, world-changing, primordial chunk of info?
Simple. I just clicked on "Next Blog."
I wanted to learn about my fellow bloggers, get pointers, and sponge some sage wisdom from grizzled veterans more savvy than me. So I tried Blogger's "Next Blog" button. There it is, right there at the top right hand side of this page. It's like the lever of a slot machine. Drop your change, flick it down, watch the window and see what comes up.
But what did I find?
Well, firstly, the slot machine analogy isn't far off. Not far off at all. In fact, it is apt. As with a slot machine, browsing the blogosphere is frequently, almost always a bust, a colossal waste of time.
Remember those webpages with dark, purple background images that looked like shower curtains in a porn film? Those gaudy green links, or flashing banners, or white text on black backgrounds? The eyesores with no semblance of how to size fonts or how to arrange the contents? Remember the kinds of pages where the links came one by one, from top to bottom, center-formatted, like unrolling a roll of toilet paper?
That's right -- the bad old days of amateur web design are upon us again.
But then, suddenly . . . there's a blog that makes sense -- it seems to mean something. Perhaps it's someone who doesn't even say much, but who is consistently clever or nice. Or there's a niche that was begging to be filled, and it earns a following.
It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, it's as if you've found a friendly port in a bad storm. Something so delicate, so rare, it needs to be saved right now, lest it disappear, never to be found again.
It comes after dropping hundreds of proverbial quarters into the Blogging Machine, browsing and sampling, knowing there has to be one, just one more blog that is worth visiting, maybe even worth bookmarking. It comes after hard time spent watching the dregs of the Net and their detritus. It makes the hardship feel worthwhile, just to find a flake of gold in the pan.
And it is in that spirit that I continue blogging, trying to be interesting and useful, hoping that my efforts will not result in the evil that I have seen, so that I may dwell in the house of the Web, indefinitely ever after, or until I get bored and stop.
Amen.
At the risk of seriously harming whatever newborn karma the blogging gods have allowed me, I just wanted to uncork the bottle and let my feelings out. What I'm learning in my first baby steps into the blogging universe is that there is an incredible, astounding, utterly planet-sized pile of blogging crap out there.
How did I find out this essential, earth-shattering, world-changing, primordial chunk of info?
Simple. I just clicked on "Next Blog."
I wanted to learn about my fellow bloggers, get pointers, and sponge some sage wisdom from grizzled veterans more savvy than me. So I tried Blogger's "Next Blog" button. There it is, right there at the top right hand side of this page. It's like the lever of a slot machine. Drop your change, flick it down, watch the window and see what comes up.
But what did I find?
Well, firstly, the slot machine analogy isn't far off. Not far off at all. In fact, it is apt. As with a slot machine, browsing the blogosphere is frequently, almost always a bust, a colossal waste of time.
- There are spammers using blogs as impromptu advertising tools. They don't care who you are, they're just glad you've stumbled on them, because they're getting paid by the pageload, and they'll get paid more if you try clicking on a link.
- Teenagers are discovering the everlasting annoyance of Javascript greeting messages on entrance and exit (all of them in "l33t 5p34k"), that require visitors to click multiple times just for the sublime honor of coming and going.
On one occasion I had to click OK a half-dozen times just to load a page, and then a half-dozen more just to leave (immediately, I might add) -- I felt trapped by Javascript. - Some blogs load with annoying WAV files (something that's actually encouraged by Blogger on the Dashboard), proving that angering your visitors isn't yet a dead art.
WAVs are only used on a blog by those who have never experienced the aggravation of an involutarily loading sound on a webpage. If you have a WAV on yours, try updating your blog, then do some editing, and then reload your page a few times. Repeat this over and over again. If you're sane, you'll eventually turn the WAVs off. - Some bloggers try to reformat their pages in unique, non-vanilla templates. Many become badly broken, with truly awful formatting results. I feel sorry for some of these bloggers, because frequently they are FrontPage templates gone berzerk.
- A few bloggers must have eyesight better than 20/20, posting blog text with teeny-weeny font sizes (do you really need 6 point Verdana, or is your screen size 640x480?).
- Some people get carried away linking to other bloggers, listing miles and miles of links, with some of them carelessly repeated. Who cares to browse hundreds of links with so many meaningless names?
- Many people create blogs only to discover, "I have nothing to say." The funny part of this is how many of these blogs stay on the Web, sharing this realization with every new visitor.
- Some blogs get launched and don't survive their own IPO. Like a new toy on Christmas morning, they get played with briefly and then are forgotten. (This very blog was guilty of this sin for almost a year.)
- There are the people with dozens of applet toys dropped into their blogs to satisfy their own short attention spans, attempting to cover up for what they don't have to say.
- And then there's the quality of blog writing, ranging from truly atrocious to the merely marginal.
Remember those webpages with dark, purple background images that looked like shower curtains in a porn film? Those gaudy green links, or flashing banners, or white text on black backgrounds? The eyesores with no semblance of how to size fonts or how to arrange the contents? Remember the kinds of pages where the links came one by one, from top to bottom, center-formatted, like unrolling a roll of toilet paper?
That's right -- the bad old days of amateur web design are upon us again.
But then, suddenly . . . there's a blog that makes sense -- it seems to mean something. Perhaps it's someone who doesn't even say much, but who is consistently clever or nice. Or there's a niche that was begging to be filled, and it earns a following.
It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, it's as if you've found a friendly port in a bad storm. Something so delicate, so rare, it needs to be saved right now, lest it disappear, never to be found again.
It comes after dropping hundreds of proverbial quarters into the Blogging Machine, browsing and sampling, knowing there has to be one, just one more blog that is worth visiting, maybe even worth bookmarking. It comes after hard time spent watching the dregs of the Net and their detritus. It makes the hardship feel worthwhile, just to find a flake of gold in the pan.
And it is in that spirit that I continue blogging, trying to be interesting and useful, hoping that my efforts will not result in the evil that I have seen, so that I may dwell in the house of the Web, indefinitely ever after, or until I get bored and stop.
Amen.
posted by Administrator at 1:31 AM
1 Comments:
Amen is right. I too fell into the
land of blogging abandon, till I started clicking "next blog" and became more determined to put something out there. At least something grammatically correct.
Good luck!
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