Bloggers – don’t believe your own publicity

I have a blog, I’m not sure how many people read it. You are, though. It’s a laugh. I take the piss out of things and get to put up rude pictures. What unrequited sex toy industry schoolboy wouldn’t want to do that? Having been steeped in t’Internet for a decade and having read Naked Conversations I can see the benefit of blogs for business, culcha, technology, politics and much else besides. But what I absolutely can’t stand, or understand, is the unrelenting willingness of bloggers to put their hobby on some kind of pedestal, to afford it more importance than it really has.

One of the RSS feeds in my (Google) reader is A PR Guy’s Musings. As far as I can tell, it’s a well-respected blog with regular, well-written, thought-provoking posts. At least, I find a lot of it interesting. But then he goes and spoils it all by unquestioningly reporting that the Blogging Britain survey commissioned by [blogging company] MSN Spaces has found:

“More than a quarter of UK internet users now write an online blog…”

I can forgive (just) the Daily Mail gushing over the same survey because they’ve got column inches to fill and they probably don’t know one of of WordPress from Typepad.

But the PR Guy should know – and do – better. He doesn’t have to post the story at all. He can easily ignore it. And he should know most surveys are rubbish and usually find in favour of the company that commissioned them.

So why does he report it? Because as a blogger he’s desperate to bask in the reflected glory of blogging. If blogging is important then his blog his important. And my blog. And your blog. And everyone’s blog – including the one that my girlfriend just started.

But let’s stop to analyse that 1-in-4 Internet users write a blog stat. Is it believable? Would a credible blogger be right to report it unquestioned?

On the macro level, it means there are roughly 10 million UK blogs – in 2005 there were 37.6 million UK Internet users according to the CIA Factbook. At the risk of being hoist on my own petard, I only went as far as Google to find that out – and it only spent 0.08s second doing it on my behalf. But at least I made some attempt to do my own sums.

Does 10 million UK blogs sound like a realistic number? I can’t persuade Technorati to tell me how many of its 55 million blogs are from the UK, but you get 596 results when you search for “UK”. So I would guess not.

On the micro level, write a list of the people near and dear to you who are online and note whether (or, more likely, not) they write a blog. Here’s mine for starters:

Me: YES!
M’Colleague Neal: No
My Girlfriend: YES!
Neal’s Girlfriend: No
My #1 Son: No
My #2 Son: No
My Dad: No
My #1 Sister: No
My #2 Sister: No
My Mate Chris: YES! (is that a blog or just a Web site?)
My Mate Dave: No
My Mate Ed: No
My Mate Paul: No
M’Colleague Geoff: No
M’Colleague Ruth: No
M’Colleague Denise: No
M’Colleague Elk: No
My Golf Chum Alan: No
My Golf Chum Paul: No
My Golf Chum Alan’s Wife: No

So what’s that – 3 out of 20, even if you include that nascent Moomin gibberish. I haven’t deliberately excluded people who I know run blogs, just as I haven’t included 6 other work colleagues and the 50 people on the golf society mailing list I run that I am 99% certain wouldn’t even know what a blog is. It’s not anywhere close to 1 in 4.

I don’t mean to single out PR Guy – I like his blog – and he’s not the only person to believe blogging’s own hype. I read half of The World Is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century and enjoyed it until it started to get too, well, boring.

But even early on it had a throwaway line that really irritated me. A sentence started:

“In 10 years’ time when everbody you know has a blog…”

Thomas Friedman stuck it in there as if it were a fait accomplis, a prediction that had already come true.

But it’s just bollocks, symptomatic (again) of the technorati’s Web-2.0-centric view of the world that places blogging at the centre not only of the Intyweb, but of everybody’s lives. What is it about blogging that is so vital (in every sense of the word) that makes Friedman believe everybody will be doing it in 10 years’ time?

What, am I only going to know people who own (or have access to) a computer? And everybody who I know who does have a computer will take time every day to two to spooge their thoughts on to the Internet? Including my grandchildren, aging parents and Dawkins knows who else? Get real.

We’ve had paper and pencils for thousands of years, but we don’t all keep a diary. What is it about the vanity of self-publishing a blog that makes him think that we’ll all want to spew our thoughts on to the Web whereas we won’t on paper? Just because it’s easy and it’s possible and we might get an audience?

Computers have made loads of stuff easy for years, not least word processing, electronic music, digital video and digital photography. But where’s the explosion of Windows-based writers, Apple-powered Liebowitzes and Core Due Chemical Brotherseseses? They’re not anywhere because (as some clever bloke said on a TV programme I watched) you mustn’t confuse creative tools with creativity itself.

Yes, blogging services makes it easy to, er, blog. And the Web, Google and social networking makes it easy(ish) to find an audience. But if you’ve got nothing to say, what does it matter? If you’ve got dozens of better things to do, why should you be (expected to) blog?

I blog because I like computers, I’m a bit of a nerd, I can upload rude pictures and some people might come here, find out about LoveHoney and maybe end up buying something. Blogging is a hobby, like badminton, bingo and no doubt many other thing that begins with ‘b’. But I don’t think it’s any more than that – for me at least.

So what is it about blogging that makes bloggers want (everyone else) to believe that their hobby is so important?

And why are bloggers, literally in the case of the MSN Spaces survey, so willing to believe their own publicity?

Tagged as: Online Marketing