Bloggination must be stopped

by Dave McAwesome

Let me start with a short preface here: I'm not a total jerk and if you email or post in my forum or whatever about your blog, I will visit it, comment and will most likely find SOMETHING praiseworthy about your efforts. Okay, now let's get out the steak knife o' bitterness and cut into the next paragraph, in which I begin with the hopelessly forbidding: "I don't want to sound like a jerk."

I don't want to sound like a jerk. I mean, I'm glad blogging has encouraged people to write more. But the downside is: It's encouraged people to write more. A lot of people don't write very well. And that's fine. I can't hit a curveball. Hell, I can't hit a fastball either. I also have significant trouble with teeball. But that's okay. It doesn't make me a bad person. It just makes me a bad baseball player.

I don't mind the idea of an online diary or a public space to vent ideas, but I have a few specific problems with particular types of bloggers.

1. Bloggers who refer to themselves as evangelists. Shut the hell up. If you lose so much perspective on your life, your Web site and your writing that you give yourself a promotion to the self-important and utterly meaningless title of "evangelist," then I'm going to elevate my own self-importance to say, "your blog is now officially a crapyard, a place where asstards such as yourself dump crap in a yard until the yard is so full of crap it ceases to be a regular yard and is now a crapyard. You suck." Seriously, if you think so goddamn highly of yourself, smell the toilet after your next sit-down. Stinks, don't it? Just like everybody else's. Jerk. (Update: this 1st trend has finally abated and is relegated to the status of antiquated business jargon.)

2. Political bloggers who spew invective hatred at their keyboard. None of us care, assnut. Check that, there are maybe 5,000 people on the planet who care and they're all writing the same goddamn blog and you're all hooked into the same traffic exchange programs and the amount of information you really know about the socio-political sciences couldn't fill a bumper sticker.

3. Bloggers who can't write but think they can. If you can't write but still put up a blog, that's fine. Be upfront with it.

4. Bloggers who use any one of the following words or phrases in their blog title (go list-o-matic): musings, random, ramblings, things in my head, proud Republican, proud Democrat, my family (none of us care about your family; if they're so freaking great, why aren't you playing Jenga with 'em instead of sitting in front of your computer? What's that? Huh? Yeah, I thought so, tough guy.), my personal (insert nonsense here) page.

5. One thing I really enjoy about the blogosphere (gah, cough, what a stupid word...I'm a tool for even using it just this once) is the creativity of titles. On the other hand, one thing I really hate are bad titles. One kind of title in particular is cause enough for a savage beatings: "So-and-so has a blog!" Complete with exclamation point. No kidding, genius. You've got a blog. Noticed it from the Google Blogspot standard template. And now your title. Things are much clearer now. Thank you.

These things aren't evil in and of themselves. If you want to put up a really personal notebook of your noodlings, go right ahead. What I don't understand is why you put up "My random personal musings about my left elbow dot blogspot dot com," and then proceed to get listed on BlogLinker, BlogClicker, BlogExplosion, BlogRolling and a million other link and traffic exchanges in a sad bid for attention. Stop being fake-shy. You want to try for 5,000 unique visits a month? Fine. Just change the name of your stupid, pointless blog from "My random personal musings about my left elbow dot blogspot dot com," to "The GREATEST left elbow in the UNIVERSE dot com." Don't pretend to be humble. If your blog really and truly is about your "random, personal musings," then keep it that way. Rename your site and broadcast it to all the world. If you're itching for traffic so bad, you are forbidden to use words like 'my,' 'personal,' 'ramblings,' etc. I'm just asking for a little honesty. There is nothing wrong with having a personal blog whose only visitors are your friends and family. Not everything needs to be spelled with 32 exclamation points and roughly hurled into the vast spiraling miasma of bloggination. Just sayin . . .

What else? I also hate bitter, angry ramblings like this one, so I'll stop now.

Proof I'm not a total wingnut of bile: I helped someone.

Or check out my more helpful blogging tips.