Unfortunately, the doubt doesn’t usually last long. Or at least, not long enough to actually force some considered thinking (as this would inevitably result in a change of plan for all but the most moronic of humans). Bloggers who experience this blog-anxiety have come up with a ruse to ensure, much like the lesser well-thought out aspects to Scientology, the anxiety gets quickly and quietly swept under the nearest carpet.

BLOGCONS, or Blogger conferences, or blogging conferences, were created to bring bloggers together so they can, er, well.. to bring them together. You’re familiar with the idea of the industry conference- car conferences, marketing conferences, sales conferences. These are typically created by sponsors with an active interest in the field or industry in question- and nice luncheons are put on, qualified speakers may entertain or education the gathering and quite often all and sundry are put up in a nice hotel for a weekend.

Blogging conferences differ just slightly from this. Blogger conferences tend not to be created by sponsors but rather by the bloggers themselves. Rather than hotels, they tend to meet at bus stops. Rather than nice luncheons, they tend to eat in MacDonalds (free wireless- awesome man!). Rather than qualified speakers educating and entertaining the group, a blogger will show you slide shows of his blog and tell you what you could have gathered in the nanosecond of glimpsing at said pictures, except he will make it last about 45 minutes and will be so shy, or so loud and over the top, that either way you will tune out his voice within 3.456 seconds and instead concentrate on the quiet ringing sound your ears make whenever you breathe in or out sharply.

The main reason for BLOGCONS is to reinforce the delusions that bloggers suffer from: that what they spend their time doing is (a) important, (b) worthwhile, (c) admirable and (d) profitable. It helps stave off the uncomfortable reality of things just a few months longer.

- Choose a subject you are not absolutely terrible at (probably the hardest step).

- Go to school and ensure you gain the required grades or GPA to take this subject again at a college or university.

- Get a degree or further education in that topic.

- Make a name for yourself, get some experience and then legitimately call yourself a “consultant” in your subject. Normally of course, you would require some long term experience before you could get to this stage. My father practiced his skills in the military for some 20 years before transferring these to a business career, and at the experienced age of 50 finally felt confident enough to put the word “consultant” on his business cards. People respected him and his experience.

However, nowadays, you’ll be delighted to hear that this process is rather more simple. Here’ how you get started. Completing these steps does not, I’m afraid to report, necessarily transform you into a productive member of anything.

- Type “wordpress” into your nearest internet browser, preferably via google.

- Read the first half of the first few sentences, in between finishing your donuts.

- Buy some more donuts.

- Try to remember what it was you were doing. Ah yes- “wordpress”.

- Start writing a blog.

- Buy some business cards and put the word “consultant” on them. You’re an instant expert (TM).

This Instant Expert (TM) should really be a patented registered trade mark of wordpress and Automattic Inc. Inadvertently, they have managed to create a way to avoid years and years of hard work and learning. Forget experience or qualifications- anyone can learn how to install a plugin, read a newbie guide to SEO and blog marketing and “Hey- Presto!” you’re a consultant.

 Results 1 - 10 of about 2,360,000 for blogging consultant. (0.37 seconds)

KILL ME NOW.

Bloggers having completed these steps frequently encounter a new problem. What exactly can they charge for? Especially considering they don’t know anything. Typically, if you browse through these search results for similar keywords, you will find that bloggers are charging for “strategizing phone calls”. For fun, I want to give one a try. Maybe if this site ever makes money (doubt it since I don’t have any ads on it- I’ll have to ask a “consultant” I guess) I will invest some in paying for one such phone call. I suspect what this entails is listening to a semi-literate man-ape read you a point by point top ten list from a website such as digitalpoint.

No awards will be given to those who work out who was the sole focus of any and all attention from the pretend-media and pretend-tv crews who attended this pretend-press conference. Yup- just the blogger himself.

So if interviewing yourself fails, and if fabcricating and attending your own press conference and diligently writing out the full transcript of it on your blog fails to make you feel special, I suggest you jump straight to changing your name to “The King of The Universe”.

“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.

So loud is the hype surrounding what blogging can and cannot do (mostly, it cannot) that real life writers which experience and skill have begun to engage in a very cartesian form of self doubting and navel gazing. “Maybe there is something to this blogging thing. Am I missing the boat?”.

Whatever happened to the column? BBC journalists covering Euro 2008, for example, now have a blog.

Tune into your local or national TV news station. Go to the kitchen and grab your egg timer. Sit down, watch the station and start the egg timer. See how long it takes before someone mentions the word ‘blog’ as a news source. “Bloggers have had this to say about [the flooding in China]..” Do they bother to verify the identity and location of the blogger? Chances are, it’s an american teenager trying to cash in on the events overseas to make a quick dollar from advertising. Here’s a better idea: actually send a journalist to China to talk to Chinese people.

Take a moment to write to your favourite columnist and ask him, nay beg him, not to start a blog. If he or she already has one, then maybe it’s time to have a new favourite columnist.

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.

It’s so easy to change the overall look and feel of a blog that many bloggers change it every other hour. Psychologists have debated if this is due to bloggers having tortured-genius minds suffering from ADHD or just that they are total wankers. The jury is out. But one thing is for sure -  the excitement never ends when there are 4 000 000 000 wordpress themes to choose from.

Changing the look of your blog is yet another scam artist way to try to get another trickle of traffic to your blog. It’s the perfect excuse to write a newsletter to anyone foolish enough to have ever entered their real email address into your blog. “Hi I’m Simpson Brackle from blogs-kill-puppies.com and I just wanted to let you know we’ve changed our blog design to better help you navigate through the mind numbingly shallow posts on budgeting for your first pet hamster..”

That’s another thing. Use of the royal “we”. Who is this “we”? Multiple personality disorder?

You need to read this blog because I rank number 1 for “dogs pubic hair” in google search results!

(actually true at time of writing)

I don’t need to tell you this but this was entirely deliberate on my part. I wanted to prove how exceptionally brilliant I am as a blogger and how I know many, many secrets for SEO and blogging that you could never possibly learn even if I was to write it in a list of 10 simple points. I started this blog 3 seconds ago and already I rank number one for dogs pubic hair in google.

(Usually at this point the blogger will tell you how you can also learn how to rank number one for your blog, except instead of some entirely useless and grammatically incorrect phrase, for a real money maker like “make money online” or somesuch).

So, do you want to learn the secrets to ranking number 1 for dogs pubic hair online? I’ll tell you, all you have to do is pay me $500 and buy my special exclusive ebook which is all of 4 pages long and written by me in between playing world of warcraft!

BUT WAIT!

Buy NOW to take advantage of our “crazy happy hour” where we’ll also provide you with enough useless downloads to last you a whole ten minutes of wasted reading time. You’ll hate us so much for making you excited enough to read through all this crap that you’ll probably want to punch your wall but don’t worry, if you put your email address into this online form I’ll send you a free subscription to anger management online blog.

And so on ad nauseam. God I hate bloggers.

Blogging, in practice, has become a synonym for masturbation.  It’s unphilosophical, materialistic navel gazing with no goal other than to comfort the ego either by elevating the bloggers own sense of self worth (low by default) or by elevating the balance of his bank account via the same means. But in reality less than 1% of bloggers make any money worth writing home about. And they wouldn’t have to write home, they are already at home. Their mothers’ home.

Here’s a short list of legitimate professions, which took me 0.00023 nano seconds to think of:

- Doctor

- Teacher

- Banker

- Musician

Here is a list of all the professions which people really really wish were professions but are actually just bullshit hobbies:

- Blogging

- Actually just blogging

Well, you’re not fooling me, bloggers. Enjoy it now while it lasts, because eventually the whole world will wake up and realise that just because something is written on the internet, this does not necessarily mean it is worth reading.