Let’s get a few things straight I may be Jewish but I know that Jesus hates Tim Tebow. How do I know? Because he told me so.
It happened last night. I had just finished playing two hours of basketball and was driving home when a voice came over the car stereo. Here is a partial transcript:
“Jack, I want you to know that I hate Tim Tebow?”
“Uh, who is this and what are you doing inside my car?
“You know exactly who this is, it is Jesus, Jack.”
“Jesus, I think you are in the wrong car. I play for the other team.”
“I want you to blog about this. I want you to tell all the people in the blogosphere that I hate Tim Tebow.”
“Yeah, sure. That ought to go over well. As soon as people see me writing about you I am going to get flamed by a million angry readers. Got anything to say about that or any advice you can offer?”
“Pick New England to win by 17 and stop eating Pop Tarts at your computer.”
Unfortunately he didn’t leave me with the Shroud of Turin, Holy Grail or even a Grilled Cheese sandwich with his image on it but I got a ton of other good information from him. Just wait until I hit Texas next month, they’ll love me there.
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It is always gratifying to see that 2012 in the blogosphere has started by another 1,964 posts about how to become a social media expert in three easy lessons and 2,822 posts about how to become a professional blogger. Not to mention the standard 872,092 posts about how to comment on a blog.
I am mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Stop spewing out garbage in which you repurpose the garbage that your blogosphere neighbor spewed out about the importance and need to do XYZ in blogging. It wasn’t original, unique or interesting the first 1,987,332 times it was written.
But the real reason it is so bland and damn irritating is because you never inserted an opinion into it. You don’t say what you think. You don’t share what you feel. You just write something that you hope every one will love. You don’t have to go out of your way to offend people but you shouldn’t be afraid to share your opinion either.
We’re adults. It is ok to disagree. It is healthy. You should be challenged on your beliefs and opinions and you should challenge others. You can do so civilly. You can dig into things and spend a few minutes trying to figure out whether there is a purpose and reason to believe as you do.
And the reality is that you don’t always have to base it upon logic. Sometimes we don’t like something or sometimes we believe something for arbitrary reasons. Life doesn’t have to operate based upon logic and reason. Sometimes you can veer off the track and that is ok.
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I’ll tell you what else drives me crazy. I hate visiting a popular blog to discover 1,000 comments agreeing with them. WTF people. Guy Kawasaki and Chris Brogan are people. They make mistakes and are wrong sometimes. (BTW, I used their names because people know them not because I have posts of theirs to link to.)
Challenge the writers of the post. Ask them to defend what they wrote. Ask smart questions that make them think and we’ll all learn together.
This doesn’t happen enough for my taste. Some of you put the “sycho” in sycophant.
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There is no single way to blog. There is no one right way to blog. Â Anyone who tells you otherwise needs a good old fashioned bowl of STFU and my boot in the behind.
But that doesn’t mean that your blog can’t be better and more interesting.
- Find your voice.
- Post consistently.
- Sustain your effort.
- Cultivate a community.
- Have an opinion.
- Don’t be afraid to fail.
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