It’s time to ‘get something off your chest’ about blogging.
I listen to a sports radio station here in Melbourne and every Wednesday morning while I’m dropping my son off to his Grandma’s house for the day a segment comes on called ‘get something off your chest’. In the segment listeners are asked to call in to share something that they’re frustrated about, something that they dislike etc. They get about 30 seconds each to say their piece.
It’s a great segment for a number of reasons.
- Firstly it’s fun to listen to people rant.
- Secondly it causes some interesting debate.
- Thirdly it leads to solutions to problems (quite often questions are asked, confusion is clarified or problems are solved).
Every time I hear this segment I wonder how it would go to do it here at ProBlogger on the topic of Blogging.
So lets give it a go.
Here are the ‘rules’:
- Tell us something that you’ve been wanting to get off your chest about blogging.
- It could be a frustration, a problem you have, a concern you’ve been keeping to yourself – really anything that you want – just try to keep it to the theme of blogging.
- Attempt to keep it to 150 words of so maximum (I’m not going to police this – but it’d help us all to digest everyone’s comments if they were shorter than longer).
- No personal attacks please – while I don’t mind if you critique things or even others – try to keep things civil and don’t get too personal in bringing others down.
Hopefully this won’t be too negative (crossing my fingers) but can actually be a constructive experience and lead to us learning something about the medium of blogging.
PS: in a sense this is similar to my previous What’s Wrong with Blogging? posts from last year and the year before which led to some interesting discussions.
hmmm….
I hate how many damn sites you have to sign up for networking. I’m not talking about reading and posting in the community. What I mean is how I “need” to sign up for every social network known to man, such as Stumble Upon, Digg, and del.ici.ous, and “forced” to register with dozens of blog sites and trackers, such as Technorati and the like, just to get my blog out there. Starting one blog requires like 50 different sign ups to various sites related to it and typing in the same info on every damn site. It’s tiring and almost feels pointless when you are starting out despite how everyone says you should do it.
Things about blogs that annoy me:
– Widgets that take an hour to load and hold everything else up.
– Spam comments. If I had a dollar for every bot that told me I had a nice site, I’d never have to work again. People who unleash these bots into the world should be dealt with severely. (I’m usually against the death penalty, but. . .)
– Everything I think of a good theme for a blog it turns out that hundreds of people before me have had the same idea.
– Everything I think of a good url for a blog someone else has already thought of it. Some of them have actually actually set up a blog. Others have just registered the domain and are sitting on it but doing nothing with it.
I don’t have time to blog as muck I like
I hate out of my guts those About pages containing only a poem or a cryptic quote, and absolutely no clue on what the blog is about.
* ell us something that you’ve been wanting to get off your chest about blogging.
* It could be a frustration, a problem you have, a concern you’ve been keeping to yourself – really anything that you want – just try to keep it to the theme of blogging.
I sometimes feel the “rules” of blogging or those things that are supposed to bring greater hits, participation, etc. keep me from being myself. I can be a blog thing but it’s also a web thing that basically forces us to niche and constantly stay on topic. I’m a big picture person and see the forest a lot more than I see the trees. I realize most people go looking for the trees and they are benefits of being an expert in a niche and providing service to an audience who looks for specific things. I’m tempted to create a category called, “The big picture.”
Bloggers who are only in it for the money are ruining it for the rest of us. My opinion, anyway ;)
I’ve been taught that content is king. I hate it when I struggle with word choice and phrasing and grammar and try to keep the size of the page / post down so it can be read and get no response only to find a pseudo-competitor has a poorly worded caption under an over sized photograph and that gets the response. Makes me want to quite writing and just put schlock photos up.
I also hate being accused of being a spammer for any reason. This is (not the blog, but what I generally blog about) is how I make my living. If I don’t talk about it and market it somewhere, then I don’t make a living… argh!
Oh, but I rambled on didn’t I?
Time, or lack thereof. I wish my day job didn’t get in the way so much.
Bloggers! All the “d00d, werz muh r3aderz @t?” bloggers and the “I want to be rich, how do I install the word press?” bloggers and the “I’ll stick everything I can find in my sidebars because I’m a giant sheep and I love every fad!” bloggers.
And also, there is a certain community of bloggers out there who all seem to prefer Typepad blogs, and folks, your blogs are all so full of community sidebar garbage and you all got your blogs done by the same community member and they all look exactly the same, you ridiculous martini-swilling attention whores!
– I hate how so many health related blogs just regurgitate eachother’s content or just parrot what’s available in any book for lay people on the topic. This goes for any topic… so many blogs just say the same damned thing that everyone else is saying. It makes it difficult for unique content to rise above, sometimes.
– It bugs me how I have this compulsion to produce content constantly. I have so much going on in my life, but I’m always trying to think about an article I can post so my readers have fresh content. It’s an addiction. I probably need to form a 12 step program.
I hate it when I visit blogs and all they do is mimic what another blog said. It really annoys me because I feel like they have nothing new to offer, they just chew and spit out what other bloggers are saying. If a blogger that I subscribe to does this more than a couple of times consecutively I unsubscribe instantly, because I want to read fresh content, I want to learn something new, not read regurgitated content. I would rather read one fresh post a week from a blogger than a regurgitated post every day.
I hate it when other bloggers duplicate or just copy & paste my posts!!!!!!
One thing that really bugs me about blogging is all the blog sites out there with a fixed width website theme! There are so many different monitors, technologies and browsers out there, I just don’t get why so many dang websites and themes have to use such a small fixed width!.
As a graphic artist I have a 24″ wide monitor, and most websites only fill half the width making ME have to waste extra time constantly scrolling all the blog pages (even the reader sites like google reader does this). Its very annoying. More people should use table widths in there themes that fill the website!
My blog is very personal and I hate it when people post critical feedback about my personal choices when they do not know me. I can’t imagine myself thinking I was superior enough to judge someone I had only met through their blog.
I know it comes with the territory but everything I receive a criticial comment it throws me off.
I wish that I had the funds to be able to advertise my blog and I wish that I had the time to allow my blog to be the best it can be. I wish I wasn’t a kid!
I hate blog spam about viagra. I am 27, everything is fine down there, just leave me alone!
I hate how difficult it is to get noticed out there, and all the things you have to do to try to get noticed. When you take a day off, or have something else to do, it seems like you lose 50% of your readers on a start up blog! No one has any patience these days!
Oh, and its hard to make money online if you’re not a huge blog.
It’s nearly impossible for me to get any advertisers for my blog although I have over 150,000 visitors a month.
Who can tell me, what am I doing wrong?
The most frustrating, but at the same time the most coolest thing, about blogging is the starting of a new blog. All the effort that you have to put in it makes it really, really hard to hold on.
But think about it, would it be cool if everything would go by itself? Would it be cool, if you’re blog would present itself and do all the work by itself? I really doubt it, the coolest about a (succesfull) blog, is that you made it to what it’s now.
That the art of blogging! :)
Why do bloggers like John Chow get so much traffic? Is it just because he started at the right time and attracted enough people to become “popular”, so that whatever he says is the cool thing to do?
I hate going from blog to blog and they are all writing about the exact same thing just using different words.
I hate comment spammers. Especially since they rarely if ever manage to get their spam posted. They could at least make an effort.
I hate thinking up a great blog topic, and when it comes time to write it forgetting what it was because I didn’t write it down.
I hate the fact that if I don’t constantly update with new content I’ll lose about 5-8 RSS subscribers per day.
There’s plenty more, but Darren wants it kept short.
The biggest thing I hate Is seeing my RSS count go down. Whenever I don’t post every day, it drops.
Also, finding new content is a struggle, but I don’t hate it, as that’s what blogging is about. :)
My biggest frustration is that I barely have time to write, so I don’t have time to learn html — but I my template and pretty much every other one I’ve ever seen.
My choices are spend time learning how to improve on one or suck it up. Guess I’ll go with the latter.
I hate how in the Internet Marketing Blogsphere everyone reports on the same crap that we get from official sources like the Google Blog without offering any real information. Everyone says the same crap from blog to blog in a not so different way. Every single one of them is useless and come off as experts when in reality they don’t know shit.
I hate not having enough time
I hate when too much hot content comes at the same time
I hate spam comments
I hate being told I missed something
I hate looking grumpy in comments
I love blogging
And I love the community I’m slowly building
What I didn’t like is that one blogger (not mentioning any names) was trying to be cute, so he changed a couple of comments that I left on his blog. I posted about it and he also edited the trackback text.
Some people should just concentrate on making their blogs better.
My pet peeve in blogging lately is lack of backward compatibility, specifically in WordPress. WordPress is great, it’s awesome and it’s free. But they encourage third party plugins and themes, then proceed to periodically break them.
Every so often they pop in with a new version where suddenly plugins stop working because they changed the database field names or themes stop working because they changed the tag names. It’s usually a .2 or .3, not a full number version change, which makes it especially frustrating as you tend to expect those major changes to come with full version revisions. In the latest case it was still more frustrating because they first had the big “branch” at 2.0 and then at 2.3 they had more changes that broke lots of things.
What’s really odd is that this is an open source project and they’re emulating one of the biggest consumer complaints about Microsoft, the open source archvillain.
I hate that there’s not enough hours in the day to do what I need to do as far as blogging goes.
I hate that John Chow gets more traffic than I do.
I hate that PayPerPost won’t approve my account because my site server is “unavailable”, even though it’s not.
I hate when I cannot go paddling or racing due to lack of time or injury since I am blogging about fitness paddling and kayak photography.
I hate that there isn’t one damn feed reader that has all the features I’d like to see in a reader. I mean, some have a great number of features that I’ll never use, but don’t have that one feature (like tight comment integration) that would be a real time saver. The closest I’ve gotten to what I want is Google Reader but even that is as frustrating as listening to a singer who’s trying to hit high note only to miss it by a microtone.
Internet users are like so many lemmings. Lemmings love to slide down those muddy chutes into the warm waters. One lemming slides down that chute, soon many more will be sliding down. It’s like the ‘ole herd instinct. No thought process, just “Look, everyone’s doing it, so I will too! Never mind even looking to see if there are sharp rocks in the water first before leaping. Just Do It!”
Everyone and their brother is a blogger these days. I have never in my entire time on the Internet seen so damn many blogs getting started up. I have been on the ‘Net since 1999. That’s 8 years.
With so many blogs, the competition is beyond fierce. It’s beyond cutthroat. Not only are you in serious life-and-death competition with the tens of millions of blogs already out on the Net, but we all live in an Attention Society. There are so damn many places to go on the Internet, so many people to IM and email and text, and so many blogs to read.
BEFORE YOU DECIDE TO BLOG…..
There are at least 75 million blogs out there. Each of those sitemasters is screaming for your and everyone else’s attention. Hell, I’m doing it right now.
This is a Social Media blogosphere. Bloggers are by their very nature SOCIAL, they blog to exchange views and ideas. Get used to dozens of Social networks and bookmarking sites and portals. There will be many more, and you’re gonna join ’em ALL and participate! You’re gonna LOVE IT! You’ll learn to set up a Social page on your blog where you will list the dozens of links where your readers can find you at the dozens of social networks that you are a part of! Not only will you develop this Social page on your A-List blog, but it had better be THE BEST Social page that anyone in the entire blogosphere has ever seen in their life!!! If you’re serious about blogging, you better get your blog out there. You’re gonna make sacrifices. Sacrifices come with the territory if you are truly a Pro Blogger. Quit bitchin’ and make ’em. You’ve got hundreds of blogs to track, so use an aggregator. Get an Invision Power Board or other well-established message board and maintain lists of hundreds of blogs. Stay the hell away from free message boards like ProBoards and ersatz versions of Invision Power Boards that you can get for free. Pay the price for it and use it! Read all the blogs you have listed and KEEP ON ADDING MORE BLOGS TO YOUR LISTS ALL THE TIME!!. Make their ideas your own, and Take no prisoners. Make nothing sacred. STEAL ideas and notions from popular culture and make ’em your own. Be very controversial and opinionated if possible. This is an Attention Society and you must drag viewers into your blog by their virtual throats if necessary! I do it and I sleep like a baby at night.
Participate on twenty blogging forums, and ten more SEO forums, and fifteen more writing forums. Traffic isn’t gonna come to you, pro blogger, you gotta make it happen! Get your blog out there! Participate in blog carnivals. Participate in group writing projects like the kinds Problogger.net hosts. Write a decent article a day and submit ’em into Darren Rowse’s GWP with ENTHUSIASM!!! Put Darren through his paces throughout the contest! Give your fellow bloggers so much primo material to read that they fall asleep on their keyboard from information overload and fatigue!!! While they are recovering from their exhaustion, you’ll have extra time to develop your fine blog and dazzle more new viewers!
Before you ever start blogging,
Realize that blogging will change your entire life. You will spend hours reading blogs online and books offline to learn. There is always something new worth your time to learn because you are in direct competition with millions of other bloggers. Technology is changing and the rate of change is accelerating. This means bloggers will be severely impacted on many levels by unrelenting change in real world society and on the Internet. Mobile technology is evolving also. People can buy goods with their mobile devices and not even have to own a computer and this will increase and become more profound with time, which will impact Web 3.0’s widgetization of affiliate relationships. Microblogging is also on the increase. Get your own Lifestream and Replystream like Steve Rubel! Get them set up on your own domain. Use yourname.name for that.
If you don’t have time to blog, DON’T EVER GET STARTED BLOGGING. If you think you do have time to blog, blog and work very, very hard at it. You’re going to spend hours at it most, if not every day. You’d better enjoy it. I don’t know why anyone would like to be a pro blogger. It’s demanding, especially with all the technological changes. But, I KNOW I love blogging so much. Blogging for hours a day does not faze me one bit, and I go to sleep each night with a grin on my face. :)
Okay, End of Rant. Sorry it was so long. I feel better now.
Ready……….Set……….BLOG!!!!!
The only thing I have to rant about is that blogging is such a tease.
You get a bit of success and, which leads to more, which leads to the creation of new and higher aspirations so that goals are never satisfied!
I hate that there is so much to read about blogging – so much that I almost never have the time to do it!
STOP writing about blogging! There is enough blog blogging about blogging, so please blog about something else already!
I hate using university computers that don’t have tabbed browsing!! Once you’ve tabbed you can’t go back!!!
I am tired of the all the social bookmarking sites.
Let’s just pick one or two or even five and forget the rest.
Could we all agree to do that?
Please? Pretty please, with sugar on top?
“No” you say…
Okay, okay, let’s compromise: Keep it under 50?
I don’t hate anything. I just despise/ignore/look the other way at a few things.
I despise spammers and elitists.
I ignore people that think they know it all – NO YOU DON’T!! and the “survival of the fittest” group.
I look the other way from things that my conscience says doesn’t look right. Like cleavage, top and bottom, popping out off t-shirts and jeans. Seriously there is clothing that IS your size. Stop making going out in public an eye sore for people around you.
I can’t really complain about crappy blogging templates, seeing as I have one, (if anyone wants to spend some time rescuing my template, you’re welcome) but why do some people feel the need to experiment with weird colours?
So many bloggers have dark text reversed out of even darker backgrounds or other themes that are equally as difficult to read. If you want me to read what you have to say, don’t make me work so hard for it.
I think that pretty much covers it.
I hate it when it seems that you work your ass off to create truly original content and all the trite, shallow, derivative writers in your niche get way more traffic than you do.
I hate that the blogosphere is so slanted towards geek culture. It just gets to tiresome to be immersed in their world view sometimes.
I hate that so many people in the blogosphere don’t think for themselves. “Oh, this site gets a lot of traffic so it must be good and it must be an authority.”
…..just like this one eh Chris…hehe
I hate that all the noveau bloggers have decided that there are RULES for blogging. I’ve been online since 1989. I’ll blog about whatever I want. I’ll have all the widgets I want (including a calendar because I like it). My page loads slow and, right now, I don’t care. More importantly, I don’t care if you care. Not all of us blog just for the paycheck. Give me a quirky, snarky, intelligent blogger over all those mass-produced “I started a blog just to make money” folks. Thanks for letting me rant. =} (old-school smiley face for the young-‘uns).
When I write about the things that I am really passionate about–alternative education, the nature of consciousness, neurological diversity,etc., not many people are interested in reading it. Money, however, is a different story.
I am also very aware that there are much better writers than me out there, and often wonder if I am truly adding value to people’s lives with what I write. Being a better writer than (perhaps) 90 percent of people is one thing, but being better than 99 percent is another, and I think that’s where writers worth reading need to be. And…I don’t think I’m there.
I love blogging, but it brings out a lot of self-doubt. Oh, and hey, am I not “marketing myself” very well by admitting that? ;-) Sometimes it feels good to be real.
An interesting thing is that you put two females screaming at each other but here I see ‘majority’ of them males ranting ;) whats wrong with this picture?
I thought all day not to write that but had to take that off my chest!
I guess my number one complaint would be having to register with all the social bookmarking sites that it takes to get one’s site recognized.It takes way to much valuable time.
Steven
I hate spam commenters. A lot. I resent having to moderate my comments just to keep links to bullshit off my site. Just because I write a post about shoes, does not mean I want affiliate spam in my comments.
Try having some jerk off spamming porn on your site. I have had to turn my moderation on this week for the first time. Some goof that always says nice site peter pan and when you click on his link it goes to a porn site. LIke really its bad enough my site has to be stuck between porn sites but don’t spam on my site…….but what ever I guess thats all I got. The same old dame porn stories we have all had.
I’m a Realtor®, and outside of bubble bloggers who hate me on principle, my main concern lately has been trying to really engage my readers and potential clients instead of my colleagues, and develop something of a following even though my blog has a local focus.
I hate the fact that it’s taken me so long to really hit my stride. I’ve been at it for years and it seems I’m only starting to really work on engaging readers. Well, the good news is, the search engines dig me.
Also, I hate the fact that 10% of my web site effort produces 90% of the results. And 90% of my effort is my blog. :)