Stop While You’re Ahead
Sep 14, 2006
Author: Larissa | Filed under: Blogging
For all you out there who are just lurking…
(From wikihow)
How to Dissuade Yourself from Becoming a Blogger
What a buzz all the bloggers are making these days! It seems like just about everybody is pouring their musings into a text box. Are you feeling tempted to start a blog of your own? Here are some ways to bypass the trend.
Steps
- Find five completely random blogs, and read them daily for a month. After thirty days, you will absolutely dread your self-imposed requirement to read all that dreck. Any blog you create will most likely be on par with what you’ve been reading. Don’t put anyone through that.
- Consider that your voice, even if it is truly a good one, is a tiny peep against the massive wave of tripe out there. The odds of anyone you don’t already know finding your blog are low.
- Write on a regular basis in Wordpad instead. If that doesn’t satisfy your urge, and you feel that you must post your blog online, then you might just be craving attention and validation–which you’ll never truly find in a blog. If you give up on your Wordpad journal after about three days, you’ll do the same with a blog that just takes up server space.
- Ask yourself if you really have the time to commit to a blog. What about that treehouse you wanted to build? Or the book you wanted to write? Or the car you wanted to fix up? Or the restaurant you wanted to take your significant other to? Or the new career you wanted to pursue? Instead of writing about pretty much nothing, or whining about all the things you wish you were doing instead, start doing something that’d actually be worth writing about. And if it’s really worth writing about, you’ll be having too much fun doing it to tear yourself away from it.
Tips
- Rest easy in the knowledge that it’s perfectly okay and respectable to not have a blog at all.
- If attention and validation are what you’re looking for, know that you will get neither from blogging. As above, very few people will ever know that your blog (or you, by proxy) exists. The remainder of comments posted to your blog will be sappy treacle, which you won’t trust as being sincere anyway.
- Consider writing on a wiki instead. Unlike most blogs, wikis like Wikipedia and wikiHow are read by millions of people each month. Several wikiHow authors receive “fan mail” messages every day from appreciative readers. In addition, many authors discover that they enjoy the wiki collaborative writing process more than writing in solitude.
- If you plan to use a blog as a way of keeping in touch with a group of people, such as friends, family, or co-workers, then you may want to make sure it’s inaccessible to the public (for the public’s sake as well as yours). Using a message board instead of a blog can simplify matters and help keep it interactive.
Warnings
- The information you post on the Internet is likely to linger for years and years to come, as web pages are archived by “snapshot” services like the Wayback Machine. Once it’s out there, you can’t take it back. An employer running a Google search on your name years down the line might be turned off by your now documented obsession with your cat.
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No Response for "Stop While You’re Ahead"
You are a heathen and may your soul burn in the fires of hell
WTF?! Makes it sound like bloggers are a bunch of idiotic, insecure fools that need “validation” for thier lives. Or you can be a self-proclaimed A-hole that wants to insult millions of people world-wide because YOU need validation and someone to back-up your ignorant statements?!
Good post, regarding wayback machine there is a way that you block search engines from caching your page. See
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35306
Thanks KOB!
For the record, I didn’t write this…just found it on the internet and thought it was entertaining…
Perhaps I could have saved myself…sigh
(Haha)
A lot makes sense here. My blog is very sparse these days. I set myself a basic rule of asking whether that day’s post would really interest or inspire a stranger. My blog is more a reflection of what interests me than it is a personal diary. Mostly.
Best thing about blogging? I have “met”–virtually–a handful of really great people I never would have met otherwise. Also provides a place for those who know me to check in without necessarily interacting daily. Important for busy people. Thanks for this post. made me think.sc
DCVITA: yes, we are!
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