Blog 1.0 + Blog 1.0 isn’t Web 2.0

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Blog 1.0 + Blog 1.0 isn’t Web 2.0

Blogging is a lonely, difficult, and stressful and most often an unrewarding exercise in futility. But we love it.

As the end of 2007 approaches many of you will be reviewing the impact of Web 2.0 on your experiences through the year. No? Gosh you are a blogging heathen! You mean you won’t be asking yourself some profound philosophical questions about you and blogging and the state of our universe? Get outta here. What is wrong with you?

Actually, there is not a single thing wrong with you. You and I and millions of others don’t do the wondering what Web 2.0 has done to our universe.

Instead…….

Instead we simply play on regardless.

We do not worry what Web 2.0 is or why it is mentioned or if it has relevance. That is for intense people who seek meaning in why baccy chewers gob out their chewed gooey black slimy wads and foul the streets of Dallas and it is also the province of the pseudo-intellectuals to debate to an as usual inconclusive answer. We others, the multitude, have better things to do.

But first I need to pay homage to easier times and cast your and my minds back to the old days when we congregated in cyberspace at places called ‘forums’. Remember these? Remember how you’d get instant interaction from members of the forum community? Recall how you formed a forum clique? Yeah, you created your in crowd and you�d bang those keyboards all night long. It was fun. You belonged to a group within the forum and also could be a member of as many other forums as you liked. You were a part of a virtual community.

Blogging is not quite the same. It is a loner activity. There is just blogosphere, me, the laptop, my WP theme and the box wherein I enter words and when done, I press Publish and hope the content will attract you and thousands of other bloggers to read it. Cold as that. No fluffiness or warmth here is there?

Blogging is also in my opinion a ratings war. The amount of stuff out there about SEO is mind-blowing. We bloggers hope that we will attract Uberguru’s to link to us. And in so doing increase our worthiness in blogosphere and our popularity (ranking) rating at Technorati or wherever.

Blogging has spam. Ugh. The scourge of our daily admin lives. Forums had mavericks who’d piss everyone off, get banned by the forum administrator and that’d be that. Case closed. No more need to worry. But spam just keeps coming. In ever-growing numbers.

I’m oversimplifying the scenarios so that I don’t get snared up in too much tit for tat comparisons. One thing is abundantly clear to me about blogging - the sense of community spirit at our level (non Blogebrity status or the muckraker brigade!!), does not exist as it did in the forum days. The people who benefit mostly from whatever spirit of community might exist in blogging are those involved in marketing and the direct adjacent disciplines such as branding, advertising, PR etc.

For the masses not involved in the above, blogosphere is a lonely and challenging environment. Yes there are those from the masses who succeed and rise to the top and share the limelight, but in the main, it’s a blogger eat blogger existence with long, long periods of doubting your abilities to be able to compose an article that resonates around blogosphere. Hitting writers block happens to all writers. Crafting a piece that captures the interest of more than 100 unique visits each day is hard graft.

Blogging challenges your writing skills to the maximum every time you attack the keyboard. Blogging is not an hour of light relief from the daily grind of career and family. For some it is but I suspect even you always want to put your best efforts into the piece. And this is stressful.

Now for the good bits about what blogging does for me:

After college and joining mainstream corporate life, you grow older, more stressed, less fun and completely change into a moron with a single focus in life - Poking the CFO’s PA. And as such the miniscule bits of your brain that you once used when young and chasing skirt, go into hibernation or in more precise terms, enter the Long Deeper Than Deep Sleep.

But I have been saved by blogging. Blogging has caused me to stretch my imagination, become open to creative thoughts I would never have even thought. I now know I have a brain. Previously, the brain new it had a transport system underneath it that was growing fatter and wrinkled each day. Thought processes ended at the pub or chippie and what standby spark was required for the workplace ignited in the office basement car park on Monday morning. Then went on standby again at 6pm on the M4 while listening to Chris Evans’s Radio 2 Drivetime show or an Il Divo CD.

Blogging has changed this beige, gray, routine lifestyle where the mushy brain vegetated like its luminous white flabby, wrinkly transport system below it. Blogging has given me the ability to think and create and boy do I enjoy it.

I was never popular. I was the most unpopular guy in the village. Every time I tried to enter the spirit of things at the annual village fair like eating apples out from the water barrel, the other kids would push my head under and hold me there, apple in mouth, bulging eyes like a fresh roasted pig on a banquet table.Not as crispy though.

Last year I decided it was the last time they’d do this to me. And I found blogging. Thanks to blogging, more than three people now think I am OK and enjoy corresponding with me. My Technorati ranking is at 40,491. So I am doing OK. But while this high ranking is good for my self-esteem it places a hell of a load on me to produce work that will increase my rank. And this is not so OK. It is a bit bad in fact.

Having said that, blogging has gained me back my self-respect and increased my popularity a little bit. And wouldn’t you think this is a good thing?

THE END

Blogging is a medium which allows me to strive to reach perfection. Blogging has let me fulfil some of my creative needs and for me I will always be grateful.

Meanwhile what the hell is Web 2.0? Where is available? WH Smiths? Home Depot? B&Q? Waterstones? Starbucks? Or is it only available at the local shop for local people?

Blog 1.0 + Blog 1.0 isn’t Web 2.0