RANT: Go Away! OneMansBlog is a Waste of Time!

Apparently, you people can not read! So I’ll tell you once again… This blog is a piece of crap, and you are wasting your time with every word you read! Look. That’s like 10 seconds of your life that you’ll never get back according to Penelope Trunk! Just check out her article, “Blogs without topics are a waste of time“.

I want to send a special shout out to Dan Bates from Monogodo who shared this article with me on Twitter. But come on Dan! What a waste of time that was! Didn’t you know? You could have been reading something “topical” instead of my random mindless dribble.

I mean, whatever was I thinking when I started my blog simply to post… whatever I was thinking? Good thing that Penelope set me straight with her opening salvo first sentence:

Stop thinking that you are such an incredibly wide-ranging thinker with so many interests and insights that you cannot be pinned down to just one topic.

Oops! I better get rid of that tagline up there too! It might be offensive! I mean, perhaps it’s wrong for me to aspire to be more than one dimensional. Maybe I should stick to only one thing that I’m good at? Forever. (Please kill me.)

She goes on…

In the history of writing, everything has a focus. It’s a contract you have with the reader. You stay within the bounds of the reader’s expectations, and if you do that, you can write surprises that seem to stray from your topic, and the reader stays with you. Because surprises are fun. But if there’s no contract because there is no focus, then there are no surprises. Every great piece of writing works this way.

Yes! That… just… happened!

Here I was thinking all along that people enjoy OMB because they never know what’s coming tomorrow. But I see now that this has been holding me back! If I would just stick to the same topic every day, then you would all be surprised if I use a few different words tomorrow!

I challenge you to think of a popular blogger who lacks focus on their blog.

What the hell am I? Chopped liver? I guess I’m just a random blogging piece of crap who accidentally happens to have a higher PageRank and Alexa rank than the next guy. Or maybe I’m not actually what you would consider “popular”. Because I’m not Darren Rowse, or Donny Osmond or someone… I don’t know.

Please do not tell me that you are just going to write whatever you want and you don’t care who reads it, or if anyone reads it. You are lying to yourself. Of course you care. We each have a limited amount of time in our lives, and blogging takes some of that time. Your blog is not your journal. Believe me. I know. I‘ve been keeping a journal since I was five. I have seventy-five volumes of handwritten journals, and it is totally different than blogging because it’s not public. The nature of a blog is that you are choosing to write publicly, so it is, by definition, for other people to read.

Damn! I’m not allowed to say that I’ll write whatever I want and don’t care who reads it? Foiled again! Crikey! Penelope has thought of everything! Ok. I won’t say that then! How about this…

I don’t give a F*%K who reads my blog! If you love it… Yeah! If you think it’s crap… Boo! I figure some things will appeal to some people, and some will appeal to others. If you subscribe and see an interesting topic then maybe you’ll read it that day! If you don’t, you’ll ignore it that day. Kind of like what we do with those things that have all the thin, flat, pieces of dead trees in them… What are those called? Oh yeah. Magazines. Or newspapers. Funny how those have so many topics in them!

In fact, I’m going to set up a meeting with my friend Robert Decherd and tell him he needs to immediately have the Dallas Morning News stick to just one topic! Dammit, he’s missing the boat!

In Summary

Ok. OMB is a worthless piece of crap. I am not a popular blogger. I need to quit acting like I don’t care what other people think and start writing for them, and not me. This is not my diary.

But you know what? I bet if Penelope spent an hour or so exploring my useless, wandering, non-topical, blog. She’d find plenty of entertaining crap. So, is that really a waste of time? 20,000 people a day don’t seem to think so.

Love, John P.