The 8 Worst Types of Blog on the Internet
Back in 2007, when the Internet was young, a plucky and ambitious group of hellions going by the name "Cracked.com" launched a feature on their site called the Cracked Blog. There, an elite team of barely legal humorists posted their thoughts about themselves, the state of society and semi-popular television programming. It was, in every sense, marvelous -- every word a bolt of golden silk, hanging in an eternal summer breeze.
But time passed, and the bloggers started getting worn out, tired with the hectic pace of updating multiple times a day. They began writing longer posts that appeared less frequently, eventually shape-shifting into a MILF-ish group whom we now call the Cracked Columnists. By late 2008, the Cracked Blog was dead, a loss which would soon rattle the world's economy to its core.
But it turns out that despite Cracked's wholesale abandonment of the medium, blogging didn't die out at the same time. Since then, many different blogs have continued to thrive and evolve. There are blogs about video games and blogs about food, and even a blog where there are pictures of a cat saying things. This is all well and good, but unfortunately, not all blogs have achieved such lofty feats. Many, in truth, suck all sorts of balls. Below is a list of some of the worst examples of how the blog format has been misused.
#8: The "Let's Start a Blog" Blog
You know what these are like. The first post (which still hasn't scrolled off the front page) says something like "Test" or "I Have A Blog!" The next three posts are a little less focused. And then nothing.
It's a problem of access, or too much of a good thing. A blog is a place to say something, and even though they're freely available to anyone who can fog a mirror, this does not imply that all mirror-foggers have something to say.*
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*These are not to be confused with people who do have something to say, but shouldn't, like computer programmers.
#7: The Corporate Blog
This is the type of blog that talks about all the exciting things that some company is doing, like, oh let's say Lenovo. Even if for some bizarre reason you are interested in what Lenovo is doing -- perhaps you're Lenovo's mother? - these blogs are still pretty useless. Crafted by junior public relations staff and read exclusively by the same junior public relations staff, reading one of these blogs is like paddling a beige canoe across a sea of banality. Think about it: If you wanted to find out anything about what a company was up to, would you first check its blog? Or search it on Google News?
Should any companies be reading this (hi, Monsanto) and wish to improve their own corporate blog, I do have one suggestion: Allow every employee in the company access to post anonymously to the blog. Although this might probably definitely ruin your company, it will be a hell of a great way to get a lot of that buzz you idiots seem to want so much.
#6: The Shill Blog
One of the generally useful blog types out there are the Overzealous Nerd blogs, which is a term I've just invented which I'm pretty happy about. You know the blogs I'm talking about: They get all excitable about technologies and products. Thirty posts a day about the latest issues with tablet computers. That kind of nonsense.
To be fair, less than half of Gizmodo's daily coverage is about looking up girl's skirts.
No, my beef is with the blogs that are styled to look like the Overzealous Nerd Blog, but are actually veiled advertising blogs purpose-built to create false buzz for a specific product, a version of the marketing strategy called astroturfing. These are typically written by stealth marketers, which are normal human beings just like you and me, except they possess no eyes, living in a lightless world where joy dares not tread.
Most of these blogs are pretty easy to smoke out -- a blog that's three weeks old with half the posts being glowing reviews of a new Chinese smartphone is always a little suspect. This makes them easy to ignore, just a nuisance when you're in the market for Chinese smartphones because of certain cheapness issues you might have.
#5: The Parrot Blog
This is a blog which seems to exist solely to reprint, quote or link to other people's content. You can find these blogs everywhere, but by their very nature, they prefer cropping up in the more heavily populated parts of the blogoverse.
This does not make you a reporter. This makes you a secretary; at most a pornographer, and even that takes good balance and a gentle touch.
There are a lot of varieties of parroting, three of which I've listed below:
The Linker
(or "Look at this other guy's useful content")
Come on, guys. Use a link as a reference for your own discussion of something, not as the meat of the blog post itself. Sharing information is nice, but if these other blogs are so great, I'll soon just start hanging out there. (And bitching about their link posting habits most likely.)
The Commentary
(or "Here's a lengthy quote from someone else, plus most of a sentence from me explaining why I agree/disagree with it.")
A variant of the linker, this one is popular amongst bloggers who feel a need to blog but don't have anything to say. If I'm hanging out at your blog, it's a safe bet that it's because you promised me unsavory pics of young starlets and/or I enjoy your writing. Please provide one or the other immediately.
The Dissection
(or "Here's a lengthy quote from someone else, broken up into individual points, and why I disagree with each point.")
There's a special, tedious place in hell for anyone who makes this type of post. When read aloud, it's impossible to use anything other than a shrill, nasally voice.
One trick about writing for the Internet is remembering how little most of your readers give a fuck about anything. At all times, they are a second away from every other site on the Internet, 75 percent of which have boobies. So don't try entertaining them with one side of a pedantic argument. Make your case, in all your own words, slap on a picture of some twins riding a Slip n' Slide and get out of the way.
I PUT MY OPINIONS UP ON MY FACEBOOK NOTES CAUSE I KNOW NOBODY GIVES A s**t BUT ME, I GET TO BLOG BULLSHIT, NOBODY HAS TO READ IT AND I FEEL FULFILLED. THAT EQUALS HAPPY, HAPPY, JOY, JOY.
ReplyWhen I realized there were blogs out there totally copying my whole posts I was totally WTF.
ReplyThe Google Panda update helped to take care of a lot of the spam blogs, which has helped to kull some of the poor serp results.
ReplyI would add the 94824 blogs out there teaching people how to write blogs about blogging blogs... It astonishes me how MANY there are! And they're mostly essentially saying the same things.
ReplyVery glad to see that I'm not a full Snark Blog type of guy. Time to post some meaner things...
ReplyAmusing article, although I do feel the bit about "The Micro Blog" is a bit harsh. I feel one of the beauties of the internet is that everyone, no matter how famous are or not you are, has the chance to express themselves in the best way they know how, and to have the opportunity to be heard. Yes, it's true, unless your a Julia Roberts-caliber celebrity, no one really cares about your life. And maybe that does include your mother and your friends. But just maybe there is somebody out there that does care. And although it's true most people would find your Micro Blog insignificant, there might be someone who finds it interesting ehough, for any various reasons. And these "Sorry Souls" have just as much a right to share their life as any other important Julia Roberts-caliber celebrity. And just maybe the possibility of at least somebody caring is all that these "Sorry Soul's" need when sharing their life in their blog :)
Reply"The Penis Blog" should in no way be recommended for anyone's pleasure.
ReplyOk, what are the best bogs? I still enjoy hot chicks with douchebags.
ReplyRaised bogs are kind of neat just because of their surprising structure, what with the little dome that forms in the center. But for my money, quaking bogs are by far the best. If the surface vegetation is thick enough, it can be great fun to make the ground ripple by jumping around, especially if it's thick enough to support decent-sized trees, because shaking trees with your footsteps makes you feel like Godzilla.
Loved this article. I'm pretty sure #1 is known these days as "twitter". But, where are the political blogs, or the web-comic blogs, or - oh, God forgive me for even typing this out - the political web-comic blogs?
ReplyYeah this was definitely a great read. I just started my blog. I feel a little less crappy about it after reading this; the drawing board would have been visited if "rantings about retarded customers by a tech support agent" was listed.
I guess not enough people do this kind of work long enough to blog about it. The entry level tiers always have a high turn over rate.
The other people probably just post their rants on notalwaysright.
#5 is every teenager on tumblr.
Replylmao, I thought #1. was every teenager on tumblr
I'd say that 5 and 1 combined are the perfect summary of every teenager on tumblr.
Love these list.. I amazed with list number 4, it has interesting information about technologies..
ReplyWhy isn't Christina on your list?
ReplyBecause she works here and also f**k you, that's why.
I knew my blog was a stupid idea the minute I started to write the first entry. I had nothing say, so I said f*@# this and deleted it. This was also about the time I started getting depressed over how dull my life was.
ReplyMaybe you should think about starting some fires to liven things up. Or perhaps masked vigilantism?
Walgreens has a corporate blog that allows users to post anonymously and it is hilarious. After a while a blog like that gets its own memes and everything.
Replybelow is the worst type of blog
ReplyHey, I found Cracked through one of those linky blogs. And I only started blogging myself after I failed as a Cracked writer. So there.
ReplyGood article, though. Which I guess means I have no point to make, and I should get back to my own blog.
I don't know, I think there's sometimes an appeal in the "posting someone else's content" type of blog. If it comes to a certain type of content you'd usually need to search and filter carefully out of piles of uninteresting stuff, like visual art, finding a person with tastes similar to yours and then following their updates can make sense.
Replyagreed. same reason people use (and get addicted to) stumbleupon!
Occasionally while doing research I find blogs that link to other peoples' posts that end up yielding positive results. The only time I find this acceptable is if you blog niche is outside the content you're re-posting. In that case it could almost be considered informative. If not you're just adding to the clutter that is the web.
Chin-Chin cell phones are hip and cool cells they use. They make good call and are of superior excellence.
ReplyI'm sold.
Dissection blogs wouldn't be necessary if people would just stick to one f*****g subject per post.
ReplyI feel like some of the people guilty of #5 (and I am one) maybe see themselves as curators of some internet museum. I commented to someone else here saying they are like scrapbooks of a person, which is definitely true, but the feeling you get from some of their commentary is, "If *I* don't reblog this, it will disappear from the internet forever." even if it's something that has been reblogged tens of thousands of times already. Or maybe when it gets to that point it's more of a if you don't do it you feel like an outsider type of thing. Go with the flow, stay with the crowd...or whatever. For me, I reblog things I like because I go to my own blog later and check out all the stuff I like. If anyone else happens to like it too...neat. It's one of the few places on the internet where every click brings me to joy, and that's why I do it :)
ReplyRe-blogging for posterity is kinda ironic, given that a very industrious re-linker will end up burying any content of substance in archive limbo. I should know; many an interesting video I've linked on Facebook has suffered this fate. Conversely, the original videos themselves continue to enjoy regular pageviews.
The only good re-blog is one that adds a substantial amount of content to the original post; if you can take a rather dry column from The Guardian and turn it into 3-5 paragraphs of batshit crazy awesome, then you, my friend, have won over a subscriber.
I think out of the list I am most guilty of #5... But I don't do it to be common and I don't do it just to mimic others. I genuinely reword and add to almost everything (with a few exceptions, but I don't try to mask those as my own). I did spam on the Casey Anthony case a bit but it was because it genuinely annoys the hell outta me. My problem is that I cannot keep with a themed blog, I have to write about everything, but it keeps my a little stagnant. Well that, and I wonder sometimes if I write too long to where no one reads it lol.