Review of Life

I haven’t done any reviews recently because… well, I’ve just been too bored and busy. I’m sorry but this whole “writing things for the internet so people who don’t know me or care about me can bugger off after reading the first line” is just not keeping me excited. Yes, I am grumpy, but I don’t much care.

I’m not interesting, I do nothing that’s useful, I am living a normal life with nothing to say. Even if I did there’d be little to no point “blogging” about it. Yeah, I’m going to put blogging in bloody quotation marks because that’s how fundamentally nonsense I think the whole thing is.

I don’t know, I know a lot of people who socialise and I can kinda get that. It’s not my bag, but: Facebook away! MySpace away! Tweet all the hell you want! But blogging? Who gives a ****?

If I want news, I’ll go to a news site. If I want opinion, I’ll ask my friends. If I want to waste my time, I’ll blog about it.

What. Ever.

Amen [to misquote Ben Folds]

Hey-ho, so I come back to my own site every so often just to see how few people have visited the site. This is the real difficulty of starting a new blog, it’s difficult to write, difficult to make sure you’re giving yourself enough time to write new stuff to review, and then no-one comes.

I’m not disheartened yet, long way to go before that, but it’s probably the hardest thing about blogging. Personally I chose not to use an off-the-shelf blogging package which gives me a fair few headaches when it comes to getting traffic right from the beginning. Wordpress (for instance) seems truly excellent for just getting one’s website immediately into search engines and “pings” to various blog aggregation services. The trade-off, in my case, is that I can at least custom build EXACTLY what I want to without any restriction. If I can imagine it, I can make it do it. Kind of.

Starting a new blog is also difficult because it’s hard to make sure you’re writing about the stuff that:

a) is actually interesting to anyone who isn’t your mum
b) is interesting and fun to write about
c) doesn’t take too long to research or do

So for me it’s all about making sure I’m doing what I said I’ll do: review everything I can that I come across and feel moved to do.

Starting a new blog gets 5/10 for me. It’s early days so my feelings are pretty much so-so. Fingers crossed traffic will pick up and I get some real people on here, perhaps even posting :O

Love to y’all.

Thought as my second and proper full review I might just review blogging as a whole. Yep, rather introspective, there’s the obvious possibility of the whole infinite-depth-mirror going on, but I thought it worth at least getting down my thoughts on the blogosphere.

Most of the time, I think blogs are a massive waste of internet. OK, that’s a huge generalisation, but I have a rather horrid way of seeing blogs as too easy to set up by people who have too little to contribute. C’mon, that’s not that shocking, surely you’re thinking exactly that right now!

The problem, for me, most likely stems from the way in which I use the internet. If I come across a blog it’s usually because I’m searching for an answer to something, usually a technical web-programming type question (I’m a web developer). So I search for something and get results back which are hundreds of peoples attempts to describe their way of tackling something similar to the problem I’m having. But it’s confused, unreliable, poorly written and infuriatingly scant of details that would actually make it worthwhile.

Let’s be fair, I’ve seen some great blogs and some of them are completely unworthwhile. Take a good friend of mine’s website: www.consolecuties.com – it’s a complete traffic whore, trying to get visitors from posting nipple-friendly content. To be honest it’s pretty fun, I think if there was a community of half-a-dozen or so people contributing it’d be great. But then is that really so different from your classic discussion forum?
Then you get industry gurus blogging about important things, like Matt Cutts: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ – great stuff for those who are interested in all things Google but otherwise boring.

I don’t know – I still think that in general that people who write on the internet are doing so without trying to be a world-class author so perhaps I should give them a break. You take the percentages of start-up, shut-down blogs – the whole blog abandonment rate is somewhere between 60% and 80%… that’s way too high to suggest there’s a great deal of good blogging going on.

Personally I’d like to see us get to a point where you can’t “start” your blog until you’ve posted 5 entries. That’d learn ‘em.

Anyway, we’ll see how I get on. Hopefully I’ll be around in a week or so but you never know.