IHateBloggers.com

The first sign that you’re dealing with a complete waste of space blogger is when he interviews himself on his own blog. Yes, can you imagine, this practice has basically become acceptable. Because the world of “professional blogging” is essentially closed to the rest of the real world and real people like you and me, it has been able to develop quasi-fundamental rules of its own. These include:

It’s perfectly acceptable to:

- reduce every topic under the sun to a neat 1 to 10 list

- understand things only via how they can improve your google pagerank (including the force of gravity or the price of oil)

- interview yourself (see above, and frankly you don’t know anyone else, do you? I mean, in real life. Not just on twitter.)

- refer to yourself in the third person

- pretend you are a big name blogger when nobody, including your own mother, has ever heard of you.

- plaster your full name all over your blog and use a tagline like “John Smith on.. [ways to penetrate your eardrum using a pitchfork in July]” as if you are a special correspondent for some broadsheet who is proud to “have you on board”.

- Assume everyone stumbling across your blog is stupid enough not to realise any old fool can register a domain name and upload wordpress and do exactly what you’ve done in the 3 minutes ad break during Celebrity Idol.

Incuding, it is not longer normal to:

- Verify anything you write, indeed, the more unsupported your postulation is, the more likely other bloggers are going to accept it since you’re a guru and guru’s set the trends. Example: “Showering on your head in the morning is likely to increase your google pagerank”. Obviously I made that example up, since bloggers don’t even own showers.

- Read any books, since most books were written before google adsense and couldn’t possible help you squeeze any extra cents out of your “readers” [most of whom are actually robots, don't get too excited by your web statistics jumping from 1 daily unique to 2, your IP is probably dynamic and you check your own blog every 0.5 seconds anyway]

- Have any knowledge whatsoever about which you blog. Why bother, someone else wrote it already and you just need to jumble the words about a bit.

- I can’t go on

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Bloggers will eventually be known, in the history books, as the people responsible for completely ruining the internet. It isn’t going to be the spammers, it isn’t going to be the corporations, it’s going to be John Smith, Jon Doe and Plain Jane and their insights such as “50 ways to improve the shape of your left elbow in under 3 seconds”.

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.

Another reason I hate bloggers is that they create systems to blog, like wordpress, which require almost daily updating to avoid your precious website becoming the latest playground for Franz and his teenage team of script kiddie hackers. Those folks over at wordpress must be getting drunk nightly and having a great laugh about how stupid the millions of people are who in good faith download every minor update to protect their precious thoughts. Thoughts which noone gives a flying fuck about anyway.

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.

The entire concept of blogs became useless the minute someone decided to create google adsense (and any other ad network). As soon as money could be made (or not made, as is the case for 99% of the bloggers out there) then blogs just became the next get-rich-quick scheme for the unemployed, the lazy and the fashionistas.

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).

Bloggers are boring and so are blogs. Nevertheless, bloggers live in a constant state of denial about this and try to put off thinking about how much of their life they have wasted and will waste, by inventing and becoming completely absorbed in “blogging tools”. Blogging tools, probably all invented by people who laugh at bloggers and enjoy causing pain to their girlfriends, give the hapless blogger a way to blog even when he isn’t blogging! It’s like the packet of cigarettes in between shooting more heroine. Not quite the buzz of the main event but it keeps you ticking over and stops your hands trembling quite so much.

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.

If you ever actually have to read a blog, you’ll notice how difficult it is, even though it is normally just a list of ten “top tips” or soundbites. This is because it was written by someone who started off with English not being his first language, and was then instructed (probably for about $3 per hour) to repeat the main topic of the blog as many times as humanly possible within the text. I’ll give you an example, from a blog about how to make money using wordpress:

“Making money using Wordpress: A guide for wordpress users to make money (using wordpress). Wordpress users who want to make money using wordpress would do well to read this guide on making money using wordpress! Wordpress gives you the potential to make money using wordpress. I make money using wordpress on my blog and you can also make money using wordpress by reading my guide on how to make money using wordpress. Without much further ado I want to show you the top ten ways you can make money using wordpress…”

They do this because they think the people who run google are complete idiots and wouldn’t bother to pay some harvard physics graduate a million dollars an hour to come up with complicated yet elegant (no doubt) mathematics to prevent this sort of nonsense from helping their blog become ranked higher for people searching for “make money using wordpress.”

Yet, even though google people turn out to be pretty ingelligent, the bloggers know best and so they continue to stuff their blogs full of “keywords” in offensive ways that make reading anything on the internet akin to knawing on your own big toe - tasteless, painful and ultimately a turn off.

When a blogger starts a new blog, which is pretty much a daily thing for most of them, they typically start the process of by filling their empty blog up with a bunch of completely boring and useless posts on day one. They then change the post dates on all these to make it look like they were written over time, to try and fool search engines and you and I into thinking they have existed for a while and are at least established. I don’t know why but Bloggers are absolutely terrified of appearing to be new, or just starting up. They do everything they can to fake the age of a blog. The register domain names that they will probably never use, just in case one day it becomes popular to search for “alternatives to breathing” and Oh boy! How glad I am I registered “suffocationonline.com” back in 2008. Now I can blog about the top ten ways to wrap a plastic bag around my head and make it look like I’m an expert since the domain name isn’t new.

This process of filling a blog with multiple posts all in one go to help it appear “established” is called “seeding”. Bloggers seed their new blogs with posts. This is a tree analogy. Ironic since most bloggers haven’t seen a tree that wasn’t in the “Lord of the Rings Extended double DVD set” for at least a decade.  They love to use these real-life and real-business terms to try to legitimise their entirely fabricated and shallow industry. It’s as if they hope that by adopting these semi-authentic terms like “Seed” that people will overlook the blatant lack of substance in what they spend their time doing and maybe give them the time of day. It apparantly works since even the BBC and other offline media loves to talk about blogs and blogging. This is, of course, only because those offlin media sources are so terrified that “this internet thing” might be a serious threat to their readership.

In case you haven’t noticed I try to write long paragraphs. This is to ensure no actual blogger will read this and get angry and then blog about me. They switch off if a paragraph has more than two sentences and isn’t stuffed with keywords. Heaven forbid I get reviewed or “linked” to. Please god no. The last thing I need is a bunch of angry “professionals” defending themselves and “trackbacking” and “pinging” me all times of the day and night. Blog-stalking, I’ve heard it called.

You can’t move one link online these days without bumping into a blog. Blogs are quite a nice idea, companies can communicate with their customers, friends can stay in touch when they go on long trips and you can tell the folks back home all about the newborn’s latest gastric intentions.

Unfortunately, blogs necessarily gave rise to bloggers. Bloggers are a weird breed. They come in all shapes and flavours- the high school kid who wants to document his daily thoughts while wishing the class to end quicker or the executive of a large conglomerate hoping to make his faceless company that little bit more personal by sharing what he had for breakfast. There is one thing all these “people” have in common- huge, massive, out-of-touch-with-reality sized egos. And I really, really hate them.