| Gee golly jiminy willackers and a cheese cracker! Xanga still exists! Granted, it's lost some of its luster, but look at it! It's here. That's America, folks. And Canada. Singapore. Really any country with an internet connection. So what does it all mean? When I started on Xanga back in September of 2004, it was a basic blogging site. Contributors were pitiful teenage angst writers that mainly had a blog for the social networking. This was before Facebook even existed, and if MySpace existed, no one cared yet (things come full circle). Nowadays, writers have taken a more news oriented approach. It seems many bloggers fancy themselves the next Ariana Huffington. "I'll take a story that a real reporter already did, dress it up with an inoffensive photo I found on Google, and turn it all into an opinion forum to maximize the number of hits my page gets!" Genius! But wait, while that may be an effective way to garner attention for your site, what's the point? I mean, you get all this information from people to...do what? Is it research? Is it entertainment? Does it satisfy an ultra compulsive need to know what strangers are thinking about current issues? Just for the record, it can be entertaining when someone leaves a comment that turns the whole thing upside down, like "They shouldn't pull Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, they should just shoot her." Other than that, why blog? If it's not a creative outlet and is more for possible monetary gain, it's no longer an online journal. People only make money off their diary when they're dead, like Kurt Cobain or Anne Frank. I guess my point here is that there seems to be a lack of creativity. I see the blogs on the Yahoo homepage, and most of them are complete crap (longtime reader(s) may remember my crusade against Rob O'Connor). They use cheap teaser lines to ensure as many clicks as possible. They promise life altering information with their bold headlines, only to deliver something less than revolutionary. "See world's strangest mammal" indicates something most people have never heard of, but then the actual *ahem* article is a few pictures of a platypus and some fun facts lifted from Wikipedia. That's not news. Bloggers are not reporters. They're people who repeat and often reinterpret information the media has already put out. That's not talent or skill, that's observation. It's also not creative, because they're just repackaging existing information without offering any new slant. My suggestions: Stop with the overused questions ("Is it OK to cheat?") to get feedback. If you happen upon a topic that interests you, elaborate on it. Don't just regurgitate things that you heard on NPR, give it your own personal touch. Make things worth reading, not just something that temporarily placates boredom. Make your work introspective, offensive, funny, daring, anything but bland. Be a rebel. It's the internet, you can be so much more than you.
Yeah, that should do it. Oh, and as promised - #Xanga, #blogs, #question of the day, #writing, #Yahoo!, #rebellion, #imasecretattentionwhore |
