One of my pet peeves at the moment is that whenever I whack Stumble on my StumbleUpon toolbar, I have a ¼ chance of stumbling upon a Ten Ways to Become a Better Blogger guide on some blog about blogging (call me a hypocrite, Azhar), each one possessing pretty much the design.
This annoys me.
Sure, your FeedBurner FeedCount might say you have 7,000 readers but I’m 7,000 times the blogger you’ll ever be.
I don’t mind being given specific pieces of advice, what a good design is, which WordPress plug-ins I should use, providing they’re all valid.
I don’t want to know, though, about the widget which you think is in this week nor which Photoshop filters I should apply on my RSS icon, which you think I should make at least 200px-by-200px and 3D.
You tell me that I should blog about some pyramid scheme which continuously fails to materialise into anything.
I don’t want to hear about how to make a quick buck, sure, tell me how to increase my eCPM but don’t tell me to sign up to affiliate programs which want me to convince folk into buying serviette dispensers! Also, I don’t want to get paid to review them without disclosure.
You’re not the blogging god, neither am I. So stop being a David Shayler!
awesome rant.
Hopefully if you tell Stumble you don’t like those enough it will stop sending them your way.
Tony Pierce self-published a book called How to Blog. It was basically an entire book of his own posts (presumably his answer was “like I do”) and ended with one post he’d written with thirty one-line suggestions on how to blog. The post was great; the book, a little self-indulgent.
Hypocrite ;D
As said above, nice rant.