Chip Camden and TDavid have written interesting posts in response to Jeff Atwood’s 13 Blog Cliches. I tend to do a lot of the stuff on Jeff’s list too.
Here’s my brief take on the 13…
Before I resigned myself to life without parole in Blogger prison, I used to want a calendar widget bad. Looking back, I think that was because I saw it as a trapping of WordPress freedom. I’m over that now. I don’t want a calendar widget or any of the thousand or so other things I could do if I could get my freakin’ blog moved to WordPress without losing all my permalinks. No flair for me. Nosiree.
Random images…. Just like Doors’ lyrics and snowflakes and Dave Winer’s recurring blogospats, how do we know they’re really random? Maybe we just can’t decipher the pattern or metaphor or whatever. I bet lots of them are less random than they appear at first glance. Sort of like Thomas Hawk’s photo names.
Big blog rolls on your blog are B-A-D, but only if Newsome.Org isn’t in it. I really like big honking blog rolls when my blog is in the list. I keep my big, fat blog roll on my portal page. If I ever get through my Swivel Feeds experiment, my blog roll is going on a crash diet. The cats are wearing on me.
I use a Technorati tag cloud thing here, but I have a feeling it won’t be here long term. I suppose when Google buys the remains of Technorati one day, it will become a Google tag cloud. Shortly afterwards, I’ll get all paranoid that it’s spying on me and take it down.
Ads. Those mystical things that make the internet go ’round. I had an AdSense account for about a month. I made somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter. No more ads for me. Mike thinks I could make more if I did it thoughtfully. Maybe, but then I’d have to stop complaining about ads, and where’s the fun in that? To put it mildly, I am not a believer in advertising’s long term ability to support the internet hysteria.
Number 8 is just wrong. I’d rather read about someone’s day than yet another post raving about the latest social network or Facebook application. Nobody’s life is as boring as that. Like TDavid, I tend to choose interesting voices over interesting subject matter. The two best posts of the year so far are this one by Will Truman (I’m down to thinking about it weekly now; it was daily for a good while) and Paul Lester‘s Freebird post. Those posts are all about the writer.
Sorry I haven’t been posting much (see number 9). TDavid is right that I lose momentum when I go on hiatus, but I can’t help it. Sometimes I get caught up in the very bearable lightness of not blogging.
Blogging about blogging is actually a contrarian approach during these social network-crazed days.
Newsome.Org 