October 8, 2008

Pathetic Musings and other Tagline Topics

I’ve been sitting here at the computer since 3:00. It’s now 7:38. Before that, I was at the computer from 11am till roughly a few minutes before 2pm when I went jogging for an hour. For every torturous minute I’ve been sitting here with the intention of writing a brilliant, revealing, amusing, intelligent, insightful, thought-provoking blog entry, all while checking email, catching up on the Presidential Debate Punditry and doing the requisite dance PR that leads me to the never-ending abyss of Facebook. So far, all I can muster is this self-referential micro-analysis of the moment. It’s like the novel about the frustrated novelist, the play within a play, but for the short-attention-span Sesame-Street/MTV/Internet Generation and less Shakespearian.

I conducted a blog analysis yesterday. In my insane hierarchy of bookmarks, I’ve tucked away links to about oh… 75 or 100 blogs. Somehow, I’ve managed to maintain this collection of bookmarks since I worked at Wells Fargo in 1997. How did I do that? Through the careful maintenance of a bookmarks.html file that I copied from floppy disk to zip drive and eventually emailed to myself before I quit that job.

Nevermind that… the point is, as I clicked through each bookmark I noticed a few things:
1) 80% of the blogs I bookmarked no longer exist. In some cases, what obviously was in previous iterations someone’s daily diary, is now a blog-style marketplace for shoes, furniture, purses. I guess that’s part of the new economy, taking over defunct blogs and selling crap. Does anyone actually fall for this and purchase the schlock?
2) The overwhelming majority of the surviving blogs (and many of the ones out there that I bump into but don’t bookmark) contain what I call the self-effacing tag line. Usually the writer has no specific focus. The one exception is politics. People who are into politics, but who aren’t truly politically savvy and the general unfocused populace all use the same tag-line formula:

• “the ramblings of another internet blogger”
• “ruminations of an average person”
• “the ponderings of a pathetic person”
• “the mindless meanderings of a hapless misanthrope”
• “the musings of an internet wastoid”
• “the pesterings of someone who has nothing better to do:
• “useless minutia as recorded by an idiot”
• “stuff I think about that doesn’t really matter to anyone else”

If you search for the phrase “the musings of” you will find 170,000 results when paired with the word “blog.” Now, not all of these entries are a blog with this tagline, but I’d bet a few googleadwords that at least half of them are.

According to ProBlogger.com (a site which I only visited today for the first time ever and do not endorse or use), “I strongly urge every blogger to use a tagline on your blog. It can give your blog that little extra edge of clarification or intrigue that could prevent a first-time reader from leaving your site, due to not seeing any personal relevance.”

So… for all you misanthropic musers who like to pester the internet with your ponderings, consider saving yourself a trip to the Thesaurus and just tag your blog, “Another blog by an idiot.” This will ensure that I won’t waste my time reading it.

It is only fair though, that I mention that I did bookmark a site with the tag-line, “The Musings of the Mad Biologist” which contained some actual discussion of something specific and scientific, and I found “The Musings of an Opinionated Sod” to be an especially entertaining exception to my tag-line complaint.

That said, this scathing criticism requires that I amp up not only the quality of my own blog, but of my tag-line, which right now is non-existent.