Goose

LINKS WITHHELD

I need to share this with you, because it's creepy. And I don't know what else to do with it. And I can't stop thinking about it.

An acquaintance from high school has been surfacing on facebook lately promoting her blog and twitter feeds. Her blog, it is about blogging, but it's worse than that. It's not an insightful muse on the medium in particular, indeed there are no in depth thoughts of any kind to be found as far as I can tell. It's "instructions" on how to write a blog. How to manage a twitter feed, ten things you never knew you never knew about linkedin.

Everyone has been using these media as long as she has, and they are evolving as quickly as she can read the FAQs and lurk around on the sites. An email from Twitter itself just four days ago stated: "as Twitter has evolved, we've gained a better understanding of how folks use the service." So I'm not sure how it is that she has magical knowledge beyond what I'd have access to if I gave it some thought. And I hesitate to get sage I've been there done that type knowledge in a brand new blog from a robotic technocrat.

The best part: all of this information is coming from a person who, on her facebook profile, makes sentences instead of keywords under the various "interests" categories.

Ownership, entrepreneurialship, making money. I shouldn't beef with people who are genuinely interested in the topic, but I can't help but wonder how the hell she can afford to do all this, unless she is being paid to blog (which I suspect, since those gigs generate fairly poor quality content). She isn't connecting with others, she is connecting with pixels and gadgets and things that people have to buy into, or buy. Things that people like me don't have time for. Or don't have money for.

I don't mean to pick on this person specifically, (although she has made it very easy to do,) it's the larger issue at hand.

Listen: it is stupid to pay for a domain name and have tons of banners pointing to ME ME ME when what you want to do, truthfully, is blog. Which is to say: you have thoughts you want to type out. Maybe people will read it, maybe they won't. It seems to be that people who are "successful" at this -- people who have been doing it for a long time, with a lot of content, who have a nice readable page -- just blog. They don't particularly want anything to come of it, they just do it. The readership and comments and warm feelings come later.

Because you don't need money to blog. You can get a quite serviceable blog for nothing at all, there are countless platforms to do so, and if you need help in this area we can chat about it becuase I have bounced around quite a few of them. Or ask the bloggers you read. Or something.

I keep coming back to this idea of genuine living vs. robot people, and this is such a perfect example.