Sunday, 13 August 2017

#218 The competition

I didn't normally read other people's blogs. The undiscovered revelations that Sally's hamster had broken up with her or that Felix thought 18th century Spanish art was rad had never enticed me enough for blog reading to have become a regular lunchtime accompaniment to what was today going to be a toasted marmite bagel with cheese and onion crisps.

However, this year's discovery of Something More Weekly by a fellow blogger, who had made use of Blogger's modest but ever present "Next Blog" button, caused me to wonder just what kind of a world was out there beyond the borders of my safe little online home, so this lunchtime I decided to have a look.

Dead people. That's what a third of the blogs were about. I'd scrolled through around fifty or so and every few clicks brought up an eerily cheery family photo, the likes of which practically guaranteed that the page had been set up to document the loss of a cherished human. Browsing those pages was like tiptoeing through a series of cathedrals.

Excessive photos. Another third of the blogs were devoted to children. In their mindless devotion, approximately half of the parents had gone stark raving mad with the camera and had uploaded around thirty photos, many of which were of almost exactly the same thing. This seemed to be utterly binary too. Either the parents took a perfectly reasonable amount of pictures, or they took way, way too many. There was no middle ground.

Bad algorithms. You'd think Google would realise that half its blogs had either been abandoned or were updated so seldomly as to make them more or less pointless. There had to be some way of prioritising fresher, more vibrant pages. Alas, another third of the blogs I encountered were like ghost towns.

Irritating as the quite ones were, they weren't the only value-deprived blogs I encountered. Many people had written about such specific topics that their work was completely useless to all but the most boffin-like colleagues in their industry. Similarly, one man had written an entire page about the difference between an asteroid and a meteoroid.

All in all, I found the blogosphere to be a lot like outer space. Vast, desolate and lonely, save for the occasional interesting place and a lot of floating bits of junk that nobody had ever removed. I left the odd comment as I browsed. It seemed unlikely that any of the blog authors would find their way to my own page but if you're reading this Vikram, whatever meteoroids are, they sound nasty. Hopefully you've by now visited your physician and are receiving appropriate treatment.


Running on empty said...

Makes me wonder how and why I discovered yours. My experience was similar, though I tried it more times, so found more interesting ones. Unfortunately they didn't answer my reach -outs or whatever it's called, I usually know but I'm tired , waiting for someone to answer my email to him when I should be asleep.

Running on empty said...

Your post is up on mine.

Dan Copping said...

Cheers, I'll take a look at it.

Fizzfan said...

Like the outer space analogy. Guess it's just different folks reaching out like Cath mentioned. The more niche you are the weirder they'll be.
I guess all the ones about dead people and children is the emotional side of life. Written shrines.

Running on empty said...

Yes, I agree.
If I had to write on the same subject every day I couldn't do it.