You are a blogger, Great! But does it matter?
There are 42,000,000 blogs in WordPress in The USA alone. In 2008, Technorati said that it was tracking over 112.8 million blogs, a number which obviously does not include all the 72.82 million Chinese blogs as counted byThe China Internet Network Information Center. Imagine what has happened in the years after that – no one seems to be even trying to count the number of blogs anymore.
So why are you writing a blog, adding another page to the multiverse of internet junk?
If you are writing something, it better is worth reading for someone.
- It can be personal stories, journals that someone else would want to read. Or something else that adds value somewhere,
- Write something that has some informational value, a target readership. Write something that one can trust, or learn from. Maybe just create entertainment or some form of art!
- I am tired of the aunty blogger syndrome – some stream of consciousness advice and insights on life without any basis, any research, and little value.
Since it is easy to start a blog, you can see a lot of “least effort blogging”. These bloggers are so lazy, that forget expectation of any original work of art, research or any appreciably well-developed thought – you can not even expect them to do a Google search on the subject they are writing on to see what other bloggers are saying the same thing. Their posts are unedited, full of errors, unsubstantiated fancy claims, and personal opinions without insight.
This is a great loss – of millions of man-days, immeasurable good intention to write and share and of course, context.
The noise is so much in the blogosphere due to least effort bloggers, that voices are becoming more difficult to discover. Least effort bloggers reduce general credibility of bloggers and reduce authority of blogposts on the internet.
If you are the least effort blogger, maybe keep your web journals private, so that those who wants to work hard at blogging and put some effort can be discovered more easily and trusted by common readers without the negative baggage of y0ur spiel.
Or maybe just work a little more – and you’ll stand out. The opportunity cost is too high to go on like this.
