Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Geddit? (On substantive blog posts)

From Steve Rubel:

Tech bloggers (and I put myself squarely in this group), I am sorry to report that many of us have become lazy - really lazy....Let's kill the Lazysphere once and for all.

The Lazysphere - a working definition - is a group of bloggers who I won't name by name, but you can spot them a mile away. Rather than create new ideas or pen thoughtful essays, they simply glom on to the latest news with another "me too" blog post. Their goal is largely to land on Techmeme and sometimes digg - perhaps Google in an archival/Long Tail perspective. These sites - and Twitter too - have perpetuated a lot of lackadaisical writing....

My blogging New Year's resolution is to quit The Lazysphere. I can't go cold turkey reading it, but I aim to avoid using my blog to perpetuate it. To inspire me (and perhaps you) I have started a category of feeds in my Google Reader that include a group of people I feel really think - and do so often.


Me too.

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Now if I had wanted to stay true to my joke, I would have simply quoted Rubel without adding any substance to it, therefore jumping on the "let's not jump on the bandwagon" bandwagon.

In my view, my best blog posts are the ones in which I take two opposing views and put them together in the same blog post. My most recent example of this would be my Lynne Spears post, in which I countered two Lynne Spears slams by an opposing view that noted that ALL of the people around the Spears girls are responsible for what has happened to them.

In addition, I also like to take two non-opposing views and put them together, as I did in the post about the appeal of Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee.

As to my regurgative posts (including my series of posts about various capital punishment methods from earlier today), there's actually a method to the madness there also. I'm slowly building up a set of blog posts on the capital punishment issue, and hope to be able to refer to them later (e.g. John Doe says this about lethal gas, but Clark County Indiana said this about lethal gas as I noted earlier). In other words, the web can be a web with a bunch of little modular pieces in it. (What a concept.)

Then there are my posts that have no excuse, such as the "stove top" type posts that I put out every so often. Not only are they devoid of original content, but they're unorganized to boot. So sue me.

So, all of that having been said - what has been the most popular post on mrontemp to date? By far the most popular post, accounting for nearly 5% of the total views on this blog, is my post about the additional material that was added to the Tracy Simers Wikipedia article. All that it basically states is that some anonymous person recorded Simers' alma mater. Riveting.

As for my favorite post in this blog, I'd have to think about it - something I want to do as the blog's one year anniversary nears. My choice of my favorite post in the old Ontario Empoblog is easy - my Annie Jacobsen parody "They Weren't Terrorists...They Weren't Desert Casino-Bound Musicians...They Were Girlie Men!"

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