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Blogging Bellybuttons
By matt | January 17, 2007
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Reading a blog about blogging gets boring. Writing a blog about blogging is navel gazing.
That’s not to say that there aren’t the interesting anniversary messages where people look back on a year or five of writing and talk a bit about their work. Unfortunately, most blogging on blogging isn’t the good stuff but falls into two uninteresting categories.
- MAKE MONEY BLOGGING: This is the internet get-rich-quick scam du jour. Go search for “professional blogger” and you’ll see. These are the psychological equivalent of other sites that explain how to ‘lose weight fast’ or ‘add inches overnight’. They play on insecurities and fantasies but have little to do with realty.
- Whine & Cheese: How many blogs only exist to tell us that it’s hard to blog? When I read these, I just hear one message. “It’s hard to write something every day and I thought it would be easy.” Sub-categories of this include the “sorry I didn’t update for a month”, “what I ate for dinner”, and “don’t you hate it when…” blogs.
The blogs I have on my Big Shots and Smarty Pants page are the ones written by people who are regularly creative and who rarely talk about blogging. I look to them for inspiration.
Some, like the Artistic or Humorous, do things I can’t for lack of talent. Living Stories give me a peek into a creative life, an interesting perspective or just plain information that I find interesting. The Business and Tech writing is related to my career. In each case, there’s a discernable personality behind the site.
The joy of being a blog reader is discovering the writing of real people who have interesting things to say. It’s something that’s easier with the web than it is with paper-and-ink publications. I’m really happy I can link to them and happier that I get to read what they’ve written for us.
I’ll wrap this up by saying that the finest blogging is blogging about blogging about blogging, also known as blogging’s second derivative. I’ll call it meta-blogging-blogging, although there is an argument to call this meta-meta-blogging. Of course, anybody with an ounce of sense will see that this second term is absurd. Let me inform you that meta-blogging-blogging is all the intellectual rage. If you aren’t doing it, you aren’t a cool meta-blogging-blogging blogger…you’re just a writer, and who gets respect for that? 
Topics: blogging |
January 17th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Excellent!