“Hi this is Steve and I’m writing this post from the top of Everest.”

Right, Steve, thanks for that. The thing is, prove it. Go on Steven, prove it. And furthermore, you just climbed Everest, what the hell are you doing logging onto your blog? Don’t other things take priority such as:

a) breathing

b) conserving your oxygen for the trip back down

c) planting a flag pole

d) breathing?

The list of places where it is appropriate to write your blog from is very small. Namely:

1) Your toilet (when producing shit, you may as well produce shit).

It doesn’t make your blogging more exciting to be doing it from somewhere special. Actually that’s kind of against the whole point of blogging. You can do it from anywhere so why go somewhere specific to do it? Are you intentionally stupid? Sitting in your car outside starbucks stealing WiFi and boasting about it on your blog means you spent money on petrol to get there. You made the effort to get a blog setup for free, you’re using free internet and your time is worthless also free yet you spent $80 on petrol just to find some cafe stupid enough to not encrypt their wireless internet connection. Congratulations.

Blogging is not an interesting and exciting activity which other people share and you can gain a sense of camaraderie and achievement from. Bloggers don’t work together in jovial spirit and help one another out. They compete viciously and any pretense at friendship is only valid for as long as they can learn how to destroy your RSS feed subscriber list or similar.

It’s not like saying “Hey, chum, where do you go fishing?”

Steve: “Thanks for asking, my friend. I like to fish in Lake Blahblah, where I find the trout to be most energetic.” (I don’t care if trout live in lakes or not, maybe they don’t. I also don’t fish and nor should you, it’s barely above blogging on the boredom scale).

Jon: “Ah, and where do you ride your bike?”

Steve: “Well, I love to ride my bike in the forest, or over the mountains.”

Jon: “Ah.. superb, simply superb. And how about blogging? Where do you like to blog?”

Steve: “Generally, Jon, I like to blog in a hunched up posture, in the dark, sitting over a glowing laptop screen, straining my eyes and scratching my considerable rear, while drinking pepsi.”

Jon: “Truly you are a polymath.”

Blogging is not a spectator sport! I can just about stand to watch you fish, I would probably enjoy watching you ride a bike over a mountain, but watching you blog..? I don’t think so!

Even if you take a picture of yourself sitting down and writing on your blog, it still isn’t interesting! Unless the blog is about blogging from different locations, in which case the whole blogging part of the deal is fundamentally unnecessary and please return to step 1.

I once made the gigantic mistake of entering my email into a blogger’s blog about making money from blogs. I don’t really know why I did it, but at the time I felt excited by the stuff I had been reading, despite how little information I had actually been provided with. The language itself was exciting. It drew me in. Shortly after, and pretty much every other day since, this bastard blogger has emailed me as part of his making money online blog newsletter. His unsubscribe link mysteriously doesn’t work and I’m petrified of contacting him personally in case I end up buying his ebook. I’m weak when it comes to exciting language.

This newsletter begins “Dear Jon, Today I really want to reach out to you.” What? why?. It then continues to go on about how pathetic my life is and how great his is, and here are the ways his life became great (insert affiliate links for various clickbank ebook products). It then ends “My Warmest Personal Regards”. I’ve never met this guy. I visited his website once and to this day I still regret doing so. What business has he with sending regards that are “Warm” and “Personal”? I might not even like him (if I ever met him). He might not like me if he met me (this is almost a sure thing, since I would probably slap him). So what is actually going on here? He’s lieing. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about me and certainly doesn’t genuinely send his “warm and personal” regards.

The latest version of his newsletter advises me on how to retain my blog visitors. He suggests making a special effort to let each and every one of my visitors know that I love them and value them. He suggests this act would mean I am remembered by my visitors for a long time and my “bounce rate” (more on this hilarious phrase in another post in future) would decrease dramatically. Well I suspect he is correct – if I let my visitors know I love them they will probably not forget it for a very long time.

All this reminds me of what BBC journalist Lucy Kellaway wrote on language:

“One of the big banks is currently advertising for [passionate] workers saying “we seek passionate banking representatives to uphold our values.” This is a lie. Actually what the bank is seeking is competent people to follow instructions and answer the phones.”

Similarly this blogger is not seeking loving, caring and personal friendships in which he can nurture you to wealth. He is looking for idiots who will buy over priced electronic garbage so he makes his dollar commission.

But hey! This is web 2.0! Or is it 3.0? Better ask a blogger.

So called “life coach” bloggers even go so far as to offer off-blog services such as ‘phone consultation’ and so on. Writing a life coach blog is possibly one of the easiest things to do and has the added benefit of providing the blogger with a semi-legitimate excuse for actually having no life himself.

Pick a topic. Any topic. Fat? You’re fat? You like burgers and fries? This post is for you. I’ve got 500 words (its got to be 500 because google says so, or, the people who pretend they know about google say so, which to a blogger is all that’s important) on how changes in your life can remove all that excess blubber. The blogger then goes on to list the sort of magic remedies that a five year old tied to a tree upside down in the desert for 4 months with no water could also come up with in under 5 seconds of quasi-thinking. Eat less, exercise more.

Life coach bloggers are not 70-something grandmas with a life of outdoors adventure travel helping orphan virgin runaway children into education. They are 20-something to 50-something ex or present corporate wage slaves trying desperately to break away from the shackles of employment while paying an expensive mortgage on a house they will never own in a neighbourhood they have always lived in. They have no experience or knowledge to impart. They have to actually search google themselves to find content to re-write for their own lifecoach blog.

I propose a serious, er, proposal. All bloggers should be bound by law to publish verifiable evidence of what they have searched for in the week coming up to publishing a certain blog post on their useless life coach blog. I bet you less than 0.0001% of them actually knew anything about the topic before deciding to write on it.

Life coaches.

“Welcome to Lizzie’s life coaching blog where every morning is a bright ray of inspirational sunshine from me to you!!!!!!21″

“Post 1: Three things to do every morning to improve your life!! Stand in front of the mirror and repeat: “I am a beautiful snowflake, I am a beautiful snowflake, I am a beautiful snowflake.”

Well, I’ve got my own top three:

1) Kill a blogger

2) Kill another blogger (extra points for life coach bloggers)

3) Send me $400.

Right now bloggers are talking about “Web 3.0″. Why? Because its just about legitimate – we’re in web 2.0 now with code and standards and so logically, the next step will be web 3.0. But nobody really knows what web 3.0 will be about. Except bloggers, of course. They can predict the future. Here are some of the things that “professional bloggers” have predicted will come with web 3.0:

- We’ll all use a mouse with no buttons, because web 3.0 is all about not clicking on things.

- We’ll all have a personal loan (god damnit I hate personal loan blogs!!)

- We’ll all be doing this via our mobile phones

- We’ll all be expert movie makers and editors and nobody will type anything

- We’ll all be downloading data at speeds that beat a computer writing to a CD, and the data will be coming in through the sewer system (no, really, they are already putting cables in the toilets)

- We’ll all know what “semantic” means

- There wont be any more advertising. (I WISH!)

Well I think we all know where web 3.0 can hide itself, but the desperate thing about this situation is that it’s never going to end. Even if some “authority” does claim that “we’re now living in the time of web 3.0″ some smart arse blogger, probably from America, probably overweight, is going to claim he knows exactly what Web 4.0 has in store and will write a goddamn top ten list since in web 3.0 we all stopped being able to understand anything longer than ten sentences and separated by numbers. Again, thanks to bloggers.

If I owned wordpress I would update every hour, and send a email in big red letters to every single blogger saying “Warning: huge potential security flaw discovered in wordpress – update NOW!”. The word “potential” would save me from the law suits. That’s another thing bloggers love – law suits, or talking about them. They love nothing more than the potential for a legal battle over what one of them wrote on their stupid blog. This is primarily because it finally gives them something other than blogs and blogging to write about. For once they can include the real world (that phenomenon most bloggers have long since neglected to bother much with) in their daily musings and maybe, just maybe god please, make an extra on dollar and a half from adsense advertising. It’ll pay for the coke can they just had for breakfast. Sorry, I mean the coke inside the can. Not the actual can.

So yes, wordpress gets updated every 15 minutes with an emergency worldwide broadcast and anyone not updating will get annoying flashy messages every time they even think the word “blog”. These would popup from within their minds, thanks to the latest plugin from some Dutch guy (the plugins are all made by the Dutch, it’s an internet rule) which actually lets wordpress directly access your frontal lobes.

I’m serious- as I type this millions of human beings around the world are sitting down thinking really really hard about what possible topic might not have yet been blogged about. “If only I can find my golden niche, I’ll be raking in the advertising dollars!”. Then they use these silly little online tools which aggregate search results and searching patters from the major engines to tell them roughly how many times a particular search phrase or keyword has been looked up in a given time period. If their amazing topic idea, which a quick search of google reveals has not yet been properly exploited by other bloggers, also happens to have a lot of people searching for it, then they have hit the jackpot.

Lo and behold we suddenly get a bunch of completely uneducational boring blogs about the best way to perm your dogs pubic hair or the top ten tips for fitting a cucumber plant to your bicycle. Don’t you see what’s happening? All the actually interesting topics are fully monopolised by rich people who can employ actual writers to research and formulate interesting and educational articles for public consumption. The average MacDonalds sit-at-home “honestly Mum I’m a professional web person, check out my blog on personal loans!” blogger has no chance competing against these sites so what do we end up with? “Niche” blogs which concentrate on topics that the mentally insane and the underage have dictated by being the only minority bored or crazy enough to ever type them into a search engine in the first place!

It’s also 100% the fault of bloggers that it’s now impossible to find any diversity in information while searching the web using a normal search engine. Need to find out a couple of different ways to diagnose your chesty cough? Stuck for alternatives to upgrading your Ram? Good luck pal- you’re going to find 5 billion suspiciously badly-written (courtesy of Abdul and Sergey) re-writes of the one same article.

And don’t even get my started on the blogs about making money from blogs. Unbelievably, some of the richest bloggers out there actually make money by “teaching” (I use the term loosely) other complete wastes of space how to make money from blogging. Hello?? Hello??? He’s only making money thanks to YOU reading his blog. He doesn’t have any secrets or real advice to share, he’s leading you on and you’re falling for it. If he was being honest all his posts would say the same thing: “The best way to make money blogging is to pretend you make money blogging and cash in on everyone else’s hope!”

Can you think of a more self-obsessed and inward looking group of people? Why is it that I’ve never heard of any of the people that bloggers eulogise about on their silly wordpress turnkey blogs?

“Well guys I was at i’m-a-stupid-idiotCON last week and I bumped into Marty MacMaccyMan from idontgiveafuck.com and he had some great advice about how to turn your blog into a money making animal, so here’s a list of the clothes in my washing machine.”

Then you get a dozen or maybe a hundred comments from people who have been brainwashed into giving a damn:

“Oh he’s such an inspiration, I love how he managed to like, install wordpress and then like, write articles that regurgitated the same crap other bloggers have already written (and rewritten) in like, 2000. I subscribe to his RSS feed so I can wake up and read his blog before I even brush my teeth.”

RSS feeds! Which complete fool thought that would be a good idea? Now you have competitions – bloggers put buttons on their blogs saying “I’ve got 3,4567,456 subscribers”. Funny how you never see one saying “I’e got 4 subscribers”. Of course, that’s only if they have 3 kids (under the literacy age of course, and the wife just does it because he probably setup her gmail account anyway and she has no idea what a blog is, but is thankful it keeps him quiet during desperate housewives).

One of these “blogging tools” is Twitter. I’m not even going to try to explain what it is because you’ll just instantly become confused and angry. It’s a complete and utter waste of bandwidth and I bet it uses more than its fair share of IPs too (another reason bloggers should be banned from using oxygen – we’re running out of IPs and they all want their own for “SEO”. Don’t get me started on SEO.) Using twitter is like walking up to a brick wall and licking it. Completely unexciting and probably causes infections. Bloggers use it to write one sentence long blog posts. Being the clever bunch they are, bloggers quickly found out you could use twitter to promote your actual blogs! So now twitter is basically a huge database of variations of the following sentence:

“Just finished writing a blog about [top ten ways to flush a toilet] over at [myutterlyboringblog.com]”

Usually this sentence is followed by a hopeful “Check it out!!”. No, thank you, I won’t.