Adventures in the Blogosphere

Over the past few days, I've been wading through the mass of inflamatory political rhetoric, teen angst, poor spelling, terrible HTML, and occasional genius that is the blogosphere. Using the "next blog" button on the blogger bar, I've been reading random blogs in my free time. It has been an interesting experience. I'm not done with my adventure yet, but I have been through enough blogs to make a few general remarks about bloggers and blogs.

The most immediately apparent unexpected fact is that a great many people blog in foreign (i.e. non-English) languages. This really shouldn't be a surprise to me, as the majority of the population of the earth don't speak English as their native language, but it's not really something I ever thought about. Probably because I've never lived in a non-English speaking country. Or because I'm uncultured American swine. A gaijin, if you're feeling Japanese.

Speaking of Asians, most of them who do blog in English are virtually unreadable because they misspell words so badly, and because they find it necessary to capitalize every other letter. And because they use templates that are terrible. Most people (not just Asians) who design their own templates have no clue what they're doing. I particularly hate the ones that pop up the javascript boxes to tell me that I'm "entering the dream" of some 14 year-old who can barely spell, much less write an interesting post. Or even a post that doesn't involve the person with whom they're "in love." But I won't even get in to that.

Really, there aren't (proportionally) that many interesting blogs on the web. Over the past 3 days or so, I've been through hundreds of blogs, and I've only found 10 that were worth keeping bookmarks for. There were others that may have deserved it too, but they all had at least one recent post that irritated me enough to disqualify them from the distinction of being in my bookmark list.

One of the most annoying things was false modesty. The vast majority of blogs (like 99.5% of what I've seen) are self-deprecating to one degree or another. They call themselves "uninteresting" or "random ramblings" or the like. I must admit that I'm guilty of this too, but some of these people take it to an extreme, and it's still obviously contrived even with the ones who use it moderately.

The best I can figure is that people do this to keep readers' expectations lower, then they hope that people will read their posts and think that they're brilliant. The author tries to convince the reader (and even his or herself) that they aren't anything special, while at the same time desperately hoping that someone will think they're smart. It's a gimick, and it's stupid.

Which brings me to my main point for this post: from now on, I won't apologize for anything I post. No more "if this makes any sense to anyone but me" or "of course, I don't know anything" or "but who am I to speak?" or any other stuff like that. I was even thinking about declaring myself a genius (like Dali did), but I decided that losing modesty is one thing; being pretentious is another entirely.

Which brings up another key point: false immodesty is also just as stupid as false modesty. Being arrogant or pretentious about the quality of your blog is either going to be false modesty in disguise (see above), or (if it is real arrogance) just stupidity. There are people who almost pull it off, but so far I haven't found anyone who is immodest about their blog and has a right to be.

So I suppose the best way to avoid all of that trouble is to simply write posts that aren't self-referential. That way you don't have to worry about being arrogant or falsely modest, because you simply don't talk about the quality of your work. So that's what I'll do. No more talking about how good or bad my posts are.

Meanwhile, my adventure through the blogosphere will continue. I think that I'm going to start posting comments soon. I'll call bullshit where I see it, commend people for well-written posts, and offer insightful thoughts on posts that make me think. I'll be a defender of all things good in the blogosphere. So much for not being pretentious.