IHateBloggers.com

If interviewing yourself on your own blog wasn’t enough to make you feel like your father was wrong all along, another technique that was spotted by our very own antiblogger Mr. DJB (given a secret spy name for your own protection, his name really is hideous) this week is that of a famous blogger attending his own fabricated blogging press conference.

No awards will be given to those who work out who was the sole focus of any and all attention from the pretend-media and pretend-tv crews who attended this pretend-press conference. Yup- just the blogger himself.

So if interviewing yourself fails, and if fabcricating and attending your own press conference and diligently writing out the full transcript of it on your blog fails to make you feel special, I suggest you jump straight to changing your name to “The King of The Universe”.

A recurring theme with bloggers on various blogs is to have a blog post on the topic of “Where do you blog from” or “Where I blog from”. Firstly, “blog” is not a fucking verb! Secondly, “blog” is not a fucking verb!

“Hi this is Steve and I’m writing this post from the top of Everest.”

Right, Steve, thanks for that. The thing is, prove it. Go on Steven, prove it. And furthermore, you just climbed Everest, what the hell are you doing logging onto your blog? Don’t other things take priority such as:

a) breathing

b) conserving your oxygen for the trip back down

c) planting a flag pole

d) breathing?

The list of places where it is appropriate to write your blog from is very small. Namely:

1) Your toilet (when producing shit, you may as well produce shit).

It doesn’t make your blogging more exciting to be doing it from somewhere special. Actually that’s kind of against the whole point of blogging. You can do it from anywhere so why go somewhere specific to do it? Are you intentionally stupid? Sitting in your car outside starbucks stealing WiFi and boasting about it on your blog means you spent money on petrol to get there. You made the effort to get a blog setup for free, you’re using free internet and your time is worthless also free yet you spent $80 on petrol just to find some cafe stupid enough to not encrypt their wireless internet connection. Congratulations.

Blogging is not an interesting and exciting activity which other people share and you can gain a sense of camaraderie and achievement from. Bloggers don’t work together in jovial spirit and help one another out. They compete viciously and any pretense at friendship is only valid for as long as they can learn how to destroy your RSS feed subscriber list or similar.

It’s not like saying “Hey, chum, where do you go fishing?”

Steve: “Thanks for asking, my friend. I like to fish in Lake Blahblah, where I find the trout to be most energetic.” (I don’t care if trout live in lakes or not, maybe they don’t. I also don’t fish and nor should you, it’s barely above blogging on the boredom scale).

Jon: “Ah, and where do you ride your bike?”

Steve: “Well, I love to ride my bike in the forest, or over the mountains.”

Jon: “Ah.. superb, simply superb. And how about blogging? Where do you like to blog?”

Steve: “Generally, Jon, I like to blog in a hunched up posture, in the dark, sitting over a glowing laptop screen, straining my eyes and scratching my considerable rear, while drinking pepsi.”

Jon: “Truly you are a polymath.”

Blogging is not a spectator sport! I can just about stand to watch you fish, I would probably enjoy watching you ride a bike over a mountain, but watching you blog..? I don’t think so!

Even if you take a picture of yourself sitting down and writing on your blog, it still isn’t interesting! Unless the blog is about blogging from different locations, in which case the whole blogging part of the deal is fundamentally unnecessary and please return to step 1.

While bloggers take every opportunity to twitter on about how they have single handedly destroyed mainstream media such as newspapers and television (yea, right!) a more disheartening turn of events is that some professional journalists and column writers have been forced volunteered to start their own blogs out of sheer confusion and fear.

So loud is the hype surrounding what blogging can and cannot do (mostly, it cannot) that real life writers which experience and skill have begun to engage in a very cartesian form of self doubting and navel gazing. “Maybe there is something to this blogging thing. Am I missing the boat?”.

Whatever happened to the column? BBC journalists covering Euro 2008, for example, now have a blog.

Tune into your local or national TV news station. Go to the kitchen and grab your egg timer. Sit down, watch the station and start the egg timer. See how long it takes before someone mentions the word ‘blog’ as a news source. “Bloggers have had this to say about [the flooding in China]..” Do they bother to verify the identity and location of the blogger? Chances are, it’s an american teenager trying to cash in on the events overseas to make a quick dollar from advertising. Here’s a better idea: actually send a journalist to China to talk to Chinese people.

Take a moment to write to your favourite columnist and ask him, nay beg him, not to start a blog. If he or she already has one, then maybe it’s time to have a new favourite columnist.

The bloggers who blog about making money online from your blog are perhaps the worst kind of bloggers. They like to borrow phrases and words from the business world to convince you they are themselves successful and to help up the emotional ante and get you personally involved in their useless blog drivellings.

I once made the gigantic mistake of entering my email into a blogger’s blog about making money from blogs. I don’t really know why I did it, but at the time I felt excited by the stuff I had been reading, despite how little information I had actually been provided with. The language itself was exciting. It drew me in. Shortly after, and pretty much every other day since, this bastard blogger has emailed me as part of his making money online blog newsletter. His unsubscribe link mysteriously doesn’t work and I’m petrified of contacting him personally in case I end up buying his ebook. I’m weak when it comes to exciting language.

This newsletter begins “Dear Jon, Today I really want to reach out to you.” What? why?. It then continues to go on about how pathetic my life is and how great his is, and here are the ways his life became great (insert affiliate links for various clickbank ebook products). It then ends “My Warmest Personal Regards”. I’ve never met this guy. I visited his website once and to this day I still regret doing so. What business has he with sending regards that are “Warm” and “Personal”? I might not even like him (if I ever met him). He might not like me if he met me (this is almost a sure thing, since I would probably slap him). So what is actually going on here? He’s lieing. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about me and certainly doesn’t genuinely send his “warm and personal” regards.

The latest version of his newsletter advises me on how to retain my blog visitors. He suggests making a special effort to let each and every one of my visitors know that I love them and value them. He suggests this act would mean I am remembered by my visitors for a long time and my “bounce rate” (more on this hilarious phrase in another post in future) would decrease dramatically. Well I suspect he is correct - if I let my visitors know I love them they will probably not forget it for a very long time.

All this reminds me of what BBC journalist Lucy Kellaway wrote on language:

“One of the big banks is currently advertising for [passionate] workers saying “we seek passionate banking representatives to uphold our values.” This is a lie. Actually what the bank is seeking is competent people to follow instructions and answer the phones.”

Similarly this blogger is not seeking loving, caring and personal friendships in which he can nurture you to wealth. He is looking for idiots who will buy over priced electronic garbage so he makes his dollar commission.

But hey! This is web 2.0! Or is it 3.0? Better ask a blogger.

Blogs are dull and no more duller than those written by the blogger who thinks she can teach you how to live your life better than you are currently managing to do yourself. These types of bloggers prey on the desperate and the hopeful and in a perfect world would be charged and convicted of some first degree crime the moment they are born.

So called “life coach” bloggers even go so far as to offer off-blog services such as ‘phone consultation’ and so on. Writing a life coach blog is possibly one of the easiest things to do and has the added benefit of providing the blogger with a semi-legitimate excuse for actually having no life himself.

Pick a topic. Any topic. Fat? You’re fat? You like burgers and fries? This post is for you. I’ve got 500 words (its got to be 500 because google says so, or, the people who pretend they know about google say so, which to a blogger is all that’s important) on how changes in your life can remove all that excess blubber. The blogger then goes on to list the sort of magic remedies that a five year old tied to a tree upside down in the desert for 4 months with no water could also come up with in under 5 seconds of quasi-thinking. Eat less, exercise more.

Life coach bloggers are not 70-something grandmas with a life of outdoors adventure travel helping orphan virgin runaway children into education. They are 20-something to 50-something ex or present corporate wage slaves trying desperately to break away from the shackles of employment while paying an expensive mortgage on a house they will never own in a neighbourhood they have always lived in. They have no experience or knowledge to impart. They have to actually search google themselves to find content to re-write for their own lifecoach blog.

I propose a serious, er, proposal. All bloggers should be bound by law to publish verifiable evidence of what they have searched for in the week coming up to publishing a certain blog post on their useless life coach blog. I bet you less than 0.0001% of them actually knew anything about the topic before deciding to write on it.

Life coaches.

“Welcome to Lizzie’s life coaching blog where every morning is a bright ray of inspirational sunshine from me to you!!!!!!21″

“Post 1: Three things to do every morning to improve your life!! Stand in front of the mirror and repeat: “I am a beautiful snowflake, I am a beautiful snowflake, I am a beautiful snowflake.”

Well, I’ve got my own top three:

1) Kill a blogger

2) Kill another blogger (extra points for life coach bloggers)

3) Send me $400.

The narcissism of your average blogger is never short of breathtaking. Even the most useless and boring of blogs like to make a huge trumpet and fanfare about the smallest of changes to their blog. One of the biggest examples of this is the “new look coming soon” type of nonsense.

It’s so easy to change the overall look and feel of a blog that many bloggers change it every other hour. Psychologists have debated if this is due to bloggers having tortured-genius minds suffering from ADHD or just that they are total wankers. The jury is out. But one thing is for sure -  the excitement never ends when there are 4 000 000 000 wordpress themes to choose from.

Changing the look of your blog is yet another scam artist way to try to get another trickle of traffic to your blog. It’s the perfect excuse to write a newsletter to anyone foolish enough to have ever entered their real email address into your blog. “Hi I’m Simpson Brackle from blogs-kill-puppies.com and I just wanted to let you know we’ve changed our blog design to better help you navigate through the mind numbingly shallow posts on budgeting for your first pet hamster..”

That’s another thing. Use of the royal “we”. Who is this “we”? Multiple personality disorder?

Bloggers often love to show how brilliant they are when compared to other bloggers by proudly proclaiming, usually in their blog tagline, what particular phrase they rank very highly for in google, yahoo and other search engines. Mainly google. So, without further ado, I proudly state that:

You need to read this blog because I rank number 1 for “dogs pubic hair” in google search results!

(actually true at time of writing)

I don’t need to tell you this but this was entirely deliberate on my part. I wanted to prove how exceptionally brilliant I am as a blogger and how I know many, many secrets for SEO and blogging that you could never possibly learn even if I was to write it in a list of 10 simple points. I started this blog 3 seconds ago and already I rank number one for dogs pubic hair in google.

(Usually at this point the blogger will tell you how you can also learn how to rank number one for your blog, except instead of some entirely useless and grammatically incorrect phrase, for a real money maker like “make money online” or somesuch).

So, do you want to learn the secrets to ranking number 1 for dogs pubic hair online? I’ll tell you, all you have to do is pay me $500 and buy my special exclusive ebook which is all of 4 pages long and written by me in between playing world of warcraft!

BUT WAIT!

Buy NOW to take advantage of our “crazy happy hour” where we’ll also provide you with enough useless downloads to last you a whole ten minutes of wasted reading time. You’ll hate us so much for making you excited enough to read through all this crap that you’ll probably want to punch your wall but don’t worry, if you put your email address into this online form I’ll send you a free subscription to anger management online blog.

And so on ad nauseam. God I hate bloggers.

Oh please. I wish respectable media sources would stop giving credence to the idea of “professional blogging”. Imagine having the occupation on your passport listed as “blogger”. Is there a more ridiculous idea? It would be like taking up potplants and suddenly making a career out of it. Actually, pot plants are a much more legitimate professional area to submit one’s time to that blogging. But of course, pot plants wouldn’t interest bloggers since there is no way to talk about oneself all day if your main activity is replacing soil and watering leaves.

Blogging, in practice, has become a synonym for masturbation.  It’s unphilosophical, materialistic navel gazing with no goal other than to comfort the ego either by elevating the bloggers own sense of self worth (low by default) or by elevating the balance of his bank account via the same means. But in reality less than 1% of bloggers make any money worth writing home about. And they wouldn’t have to write home, they are already at home. Their mothers’ home.

Here’s a short list of legitimate professions, which took me 0.00023 nano seconds to think of:

- Doctor

- Teacher

- Banker

- Musician

Here is a list of all the professions which people really really wish were professions but are actually just bullshit hobbies:

- Blogging

- Actually just blogging

Well, you’re not fooling me, bloggers. Enjoy it now while it lasts, because eventually the whole world will wake up and realise that just because something is written on the internet, this does not necessarily mean it is worth reading.

The first sign that you’re dealing with a complete waste of space blogger is when he interviews himself on his own blog. Yes, can you imagine, this practice has basically become acceptable. Because the world of “professional blogging” is essentially closed to the rest of the real world and real people like you and me, it has been able to develop quasi-fundamental rules of its own. These include:

It’s perfectly acceptable to:

- reduce every topic under the sun to a neat 1 to 10 list

- understand things only via how they can improve your google pagerank (including the force of gravity or the price of oil)

- interview yourself (see above, and frankly you don’t know anyone else, do you? I mean, in real life. Not just on twitter.)

- refer to yourself in the third person

- pretend you are a big name blogger when nobody, including your own mother, has ever heard of you.

- plaster your full name all over your blog and use a tagline like “John Smith on.. [ways to penetrate your eardrum using a pitchfork in July]” as if you are a special correspondent for some broadsheet who is proud to “have you on board”.

- Assume everyone stumbling across your blog is stupid enough not to realise any old fool can register a domain name and upload wordpress and do exactly what you’ve done in the 3 minutes ad break during Celebrity Idol.

Incuding, it is not longer normal to:

- Verify anything you write, indeed, the more unsupported your postulation is, the more likely other bloggers are going to accept it since you’re a guru and guru’s set the trends. Example: “Showering on your head in the morning is likely to increase your google pagerank”. Obviously I made that example up, since bloggers don’t even own showers.

- Read any books, since most books were written before google adsense and couldn’t possible help you squeeze any extra cents out of your “readers” [most of whom are actually robots, don't get too excited by your web statistics jumping from 1 daily unique to 2, your IP is probably dynamic and you check your own blog every 0.5 seconds anyway]

- Have any knowledge whatsoever about which you blog. Why bother, someone else wrote it already and you just need to jumble the words about a bit.

- I can’t go on

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Bloggers will eventually be known, in the history books, as the people responsible for completely ruining the internet. It isn’t going to be the spammers, it isn’t going to be the corporations, it’s going to be John Smith, Jon Doe and Plain Jane and their insights such as “50 ways to improve the shape of your left elbow in under 3 seconds”.

Right now bloggers are talking about “Web 3.0″. Why? Because its just about legitimate - we’re in web 2.0 now with code and standards and so logically, the next step will be web 3.0. But nobody really knows what web 3.0 will be about. Except bloggers, of course. They can predict the future. Here are some of the things that “professional bloggers” have predicted will come with web 3.0:

- We’ll all use a mouse with no buttons, because web 3.0 is all about not clicking on things.

- We’ll all have a personal loan (god damnit I hate personal loan blogs!!)

- We’ll all be doing this via our mobile phones

- We’ll all be expert movie makers and editors and nobody will type anything

- We’ll all be downloading data at speeds that beat a computer writing to a CD, and the data will be coming in through the sewer system (no, really, they are already putting cables in the toilets)

- We’ll all know what “semantic” means

- There wont be any more advertising. (I WISH!)

Well I think we all know where web 3.0 can hide itself, but the desperate thing about this situation is that it’s never going to end. Even if some “authority” does claim that “we’re now living in the time of web 3.0″ some smart arse blogger, probably from America, probably overweight, is going to claim he knows exactly what Web 4.0 has in store and will write a goddamn top ten list since in web 3.0 we all stopped being able to understand anything longer than ten sentences and separated by numbers. Again, thanks to bloggers.