Dissuade Yourself from Becoming a Blogger

What a buzz all the bloggers are making these days! It seems like just about everybody is pouring their musings into a text box. Are you feeling tempted to start a blog of your own? Here are some ways to bypass the trend.

Steps

  1. Find five completely random blogs, and read them daily for a month. After thirty days, you will absolutely dread your self-imposed requirement to read all that dreck. Any blog you create will most likely be on par with what you've been reading. Don't put anyone through that.
  2. Consider that your voice, even if it is truly a good one, is a tiny peep against the massive wave of tripe out there. The odds of anyone you don't already know finding your blog are low.
  3. Write on a regular basis in a text editor instead. If that doesn't satisfy your urge, and you feel that you must post your blog online, then you might just be craving attention and validation--which you'll never truly find in a blog. If you give up on your Wordpad journal after about three days, you'll do the same with a blog that just takes up server space.
  4. Ask yourself if you really have the time to commit to a blog. What about that treehouse you wanted to build? Or the book you wanted to write? Or the car you wanted to fix up? Or the restaurant you wanted to take your significant other to? Or the new career you wanted to pursue? Instead of writing about pretty much nothing, or whining about all the things you wish you were doing instead, start doing something that'd actually be worth writing about. And if it's really worth writing about, you'll be having too much fun doing it to tear yourself away from it.

Tips

  • If attention and validation are what you're looking for, know that you will get neither from blogging. As above, very few people will ever know that your blog (or you, by proxy) exists. The remainder of comments posted to your blog will be sappy treacle, which you won't trust as being sincere anyway.
  • Try keeping a private journal on LiveJournal (or similar site that offers the private entries setting) instead of writing to the public, or friends. In the private journal, only you logged in as your username are able to view the journal entries.
  • Try participating as a regular commentator to three to five blogs that you think highly of. This plan has the advantage of writing for the public along with not doing the publishing oneself.
  • Rest easy in the knowledge that it's perfectly okay and respectable to not have a blog at all. Not everyone is cut out to write things that are readable by everyone. The last thing you want to do is contribute more dreck to the universe.
  • Consider Contribute to wikiHow instead. Unlike most blogs, wikis like Wikipedia and wikiHow are read by millions of people each month. Several wikiHow authors receive "fan mail" messages every day from appreciative readers. In addition, many authors discover that they enjoy the wiki collaborative writing process more than writing in solitude. This is a great way to obtain the attention and validation you are craving.
  • If you plan to use a blog as a way of keeping in touch with a group of people, such as friends, family, or co-workers, then you may want to make sure it's inaccessible to the public (for the public's sake as well as yours). Using a message board instead of a blog can simplify matters and help keep it interactive.

Warnings

  • Keep in mind that, unless you expressly make it otherwise, blogs are extremely public. This is not your secret diary that you write your innermost thoughts in because only you have the key and you wear it around your neck 24/7. If you have stuff that you don't want your mom, your best friend, your significant other, your secret crush, or your aforementioned cat to know, don't go blabbing it to complete strangers on the internet. You cannot assume that the people you don't want to see what you're saying won't somehow stumble across your blog and know all your dirty little secrets. If you must record these thoughts for posterity, do so offline.
  • The information you post on the Internet is likely to linger for years and years to come, as web pages are archived by "snapshot" services like the Wayback Machine. Once it's out there, you can't take it back. An employer running a Google search on your name years down the line might be turned off by your now documented obsession with your cat.

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Sources and Citations

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