Blogs are s-h-i... Blogs can be better!

I’ve been spending some time thinking about what my first real post in my ressurected blog should be about, and after considering many of the hundreds of possible subjects that came up in my mind, I decided that what would be better than to open my new blog with a post about blogs? It’s so obvious, yet so genious.

So what can I possibly have to say about blogs in general? They suck? Well, not quite, but close, and since that’s coming from one who just reopened his blog, you must probably be wondering what kind of painkillers that doctor gave me. But don’t worry, there’s reason behind my statements, and I will share them with you if you care to read on.

When the internet first took off, it was hailed by many as the commonman’s chance to influence the media landscape. Actually, it might not have been, but there were those who saw that possibility of using the internet to get a say in things, and to express their opinions. At first it was all about having your own homepage on the internet. If you were cool, you would have a homepage somewhere on the web, and the really cool people even had the address of their homepage memorized in their heads; http://www.insert.com/something/random/here.html. It didn’t really matter that nobody visited it, as long as it was there, because that meant that you were keeping up with the times, and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

After a few years, the internet became more and more popular, and it became easier to create your own presence online. Enter weblogs, or more commonly just blogs. The idea behind them is, just like the topic of my first blog post, so simple that it becomes genious- Click a few buttons, type in your name, choose your five favourite colours to make the blog your own, and you’re good to go. Now all you have to do is type down whatever’s on your mind! If you chose a really good provider, you’ll even get a somewhat easy-to-remember URL like yourchoice.something.com.

And here’s where my beef with the blogging scene starts. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of making it easy for people to get the opportunity to say what they think, but what I don’t like is that they can do it without any effort at all. Why? Because it degrades the overall impression of the blog genre. Now-a-days every website and their mother offers their visitors a simple way of getting their own blog, and every visitor and their grandmother says “Yes please, I’d like my own blog“. At the biggest Norwegian newspapers you can’t even visit their websites without getting blogs thrown in your face: “Reader says: I want less diet coke and more normal coke” or how about “Madonna’s new album isn’t all what it’s cranked up to be“.

Okay fine, drink more normal coke, and don’t buy Madonna’s new album. I don’t care, and if I did care, I wouldn’t be trying to read the paper, but rather searching up a place where I’d expect to find these thoughts and opinions. I know I repeat myself, but I’ll say it again, the fact that blogs are being created and plugged everywhere is degrading the overall reputation of all blogs. That’s why I’m even a little hesitant to call my little website here a blog at all, because that’s not what I want to be associated with (this time around, anyways).

This again brings us to the question, why are the “big players” online so keen on offering everybody their own, free of charge blog? Well the answer is quite simple actually, they profit from it. The more people they can get under their wings, the more money they can generate in advertising revenues. Because believe it or not, blogs can be big business. People love them, write them, and more importantly, read them. And that’s why I’m extremely hesitant to accept the fact that people can’t go that tiny extra mile, and get a small piece of space on some server, and shed out the few dollars it costs for getting the domain of your dreams for your blog. It’s not hard, I promise. This blog was installed by pressing a button in my host’s control panel. Because many of the personal bloggers out there are talented writers, and their blogs are read by hundreds and even thousands of people every day, and the excecutives of the companies that their blogs are hosted on are laughing all the way to the bank because they are profiting like mad from it.

And to those of you who are ready to object with how you don’t do it for money, and it’s all really about getting to express your opinions, hold on for a second please. That’s fine, I’m not saying you should create a blog because you might make some money from it, and most blogs don’t even get popular enough to generate any revenue to talk of. But please think about it, there’s a chance your thoughts and words will be so widely acclaimed that a lot of people will want to read them, and wherever there’s people, there’s money. Create your own blog instead of using the pre-made services which includes ads and huge backlinks to the host, because why let anyone else profit from your work, fun, timewasting, or whatever you wish to call it? A blogger is infact a host’s dream, because he or she isn’t employed by a company, so they aren’t responsible for what they say, and they don’t have to pay the person, and yet they get tons and tons of new content loaded into their databases by the hour. And as everyone who has ever tried to manage a website will know, content is king.

To sum up what it is I don’t like about blogs these days in fewer words, there are too many useless blogs filled with just crap out there which is being thrown in my face every day, and there are too many good bloggers being taken advantage of. So if you are a somewhat serious blogger, give one to the team and really make your blog your own. If you have no clue where to start with that, you can even feel free to contact me, and I’ll point you in the right direction.