Pondering the world

no comment

I'm beginning to believe that blog comments are highly overrated. 

People post to blogs for lots of different reasons--to keep friends and family informed of the minutiae of our lives, even stuff they don't really want to know; to create rough drafts of that next best-selling novel and get some input from perfect (and imperfect) strangers; and sometimes to express somewhere those thoughts about life, people or the horrible circumstances of one's life, just as a place to say what one really thinks without having anyone sit in judgment about it.   Those blogs are best kept unpublished.

The "public" blogs seem to acquire a certain amount of egoism.  At first you just write stuff down.  Then you discover stats and see that finally someone else is starting to read your stuff.  Then it becomes an obsession--the more readers you get, the more you want.  And what do they think of your blog?  Who knows?  Until they start to comment.  Then the obsession sets in about getting comments; the more the better.  And then you learn about "comment etiquette," like it's considered rude if someone posts a comment and you don't reply to them.  What happens when you start to get 50+ comments on your posts?  If you reply to all of them, well, there goes a perfectly good couple of hours.  Daily.

There have been a couple of interesting posts about comments lately.

For example, Heather Armstrong ("Dooce") was approached to give away five of the new fitness Wii systems to random commenters to her blog.  On that post alone where she talked about it and made the offer, she received well over 42,000 comments.  I'm amazed the server didn't crash.  Does that mean that every single commenter loves her blog?  No.  It simply means that she was giving away something they wanted, people told each other about it, and thousands of people went there and posted a comment because the drawing was random and they figured they had as good a chance to win as anyone.

Then there's "Grandad," an Irishman whose blog I've recently started reading.  He's amusing and somewhat bawdy, and he doesn't clean up his language at all.  "If you don't like it, you can bloody well go somewhere else."  He wrote a post about comments and asked some questions.  Silly me.  I was interested in some of the responses, so I subscribed to the comments, which meant that they all got sent to my email.  I won't make that mistake again.

Finally, I've been simmering since Thursday.  I've been reading someone's blog for a while, and he's quite a smart-aleck and pretty sassy.  He wrote a smart-aleck post and I wrote a smart-aleck comment, which he did not find amusing and let me know.  The guy has a category for his blog posts called "smart-assery," fer cryin' out loud.  What does he expect?  So it's okay for him to be a smart-aleck but nobody else can?  He can dish it out but he can't take it?  I've learned that people respond to what you write in the same vein that you wrote it.

I immediately deleted his email and took him off my blog roll and out of my feed reeder.  And his wife's blog.  And her friend's blog.

As for all the rest of it?   

No comment.

 

back again

I even wrote about this already, this thing about doing something every day, consistently, until the habit becomes so ingrained that you just do it and feel like something's missing if you don't.  Posting on my blog every day has slipped a bit.  I gave up on Blog365 long ago.  No prizes for me!

It's been a wild couple of weeks.  We've been really slammed, and when I say it entails breakfast for 8 or more people every day, cleaning at least four (and sometimes more) rooms completely every day, and doing all of the laundry that goes with it (sometimes up to 20 loads per day), that's what I mean.  Add on top of that all the other stuff that goes on--deliveries, phone calls, grocery shopping, fixing things, business meetings, ad infinitum--and you start to understand what an innkeeper's life is like.

One of the things I haven't gotten back to very much since we went to the innkeepers' conference in early April is reading the blogs of my friends.  I've caught up on a few of them, but I'm way behind on most.  It's a  little daunting, especially when Going Like Sixty writes between three and six posts per day.  Over a month, that really adds up.  We've been working really hard, so when I get home most of the time I grab a little dinner and immediately fall asleep in front of the TV.  I've managed to read a few posts by a few friends and fell asleep with my hands on the keyboard.  Every day I think, "I'm going to go home tonight and catch up on the blog reading...." 

You know how that goes.  As Randy Travis sang, "I hear tell the road to hell is paved with good intentions..."  I had never heard that saying before.  Then I received it in a fortune cookie and the very next day heard that song by Randy Travis for the first time.  Gotta love that synchronicity.

what kind of blogger am I?

You Are a Life Blogger!

Your blog is the story of your life - a living diary. If it happens, you blog it. And make it as entertaining as possible.

What Kind of Blogger Are You?

I got this from AmputeeHee.  I didn't even answer the question about my biggest pet peeve about other blogs.  I don't really care.  After all, if I don't like a blog, I just don't go there again.  There's plenty of other stuff out there.  So many blogs, so little time...

I added a bunch of my favorite blogs

to my sidebar over there ---->   Last year I had all the blogs I was reading listed, but some of them got kind of wanky (i.e., bad language, obvious obsession with sex, in a deep funk, or just plain nasty).  So I took practically all of them off.  What if my loyal readers read them and got offended?

I'm a more mature blogger now.  First off, I don't read those blogs any more myself, so it was no great loss to take them off my sidebar.  Then I listed a whole bunch of blogs that I read regularly.  That being said, I also reckon that you, my three loyal readers, being big boys and girls, can figure it out for yourselves:  if you don't like something, don't read it.  And don't blame me for what they write.  I'm not about to censor anyone.  It's a free country.  So far.

It's sort of like watching TV--if you don't like what's on, change the channel or turn it off.  I have a bit of an issue with those who would change the entire programming because they personally find certain shows objectionable.  To which I say, "get a life."

So, have at it.  Read away.  Laugh, cry, be amused, get mad, whatever.

I am now officially stepping off the soapbox and going to bed.

some blogs I'm not reading any more

Contrary to how it may appear, I don't spend all hours of the day and night cruising the web and snooping in other people's diaries reading other people's blogs.  There were a few blogs recommended that I chose to read.  I picked up a few more from my futile attempt at NaBloPoMo in November.  And now I've picked up a couple more from Blog 365.

However, I recently decided to drop three of them.  I've been reading a marketing guy for a while, but between his cartoons about sex and sex-related subjects (apparently during times he hasn't gotten any, hence the fixation), and his esoteric and scholarly posts about Web 2.0 and beyond and "social objects," I just lost interest.  I'm sure his marketing savvy, especially about blogging, is well-regarded by those in the high-tech marketing world, but I no longer have the time to wade through the posts talking about people I don't know or associate with and technical terms and events I don't know in order to get the kernel of knowledge in there... somewhere.

The second one is written by a grieving widow whose husband died very suddenly of late-diagnosed  widespread cancer and is continuing to raise their young sons by herself.  I understand her grieving and that it is not something she will ever "get over."  How arrogant for someone else to say "just get over it."  It won't ever happen.  She says that running keeps her sane, and I wish her well in her goal of running a marathon.  And writing helps her deal with the constant emotional roller coaster.  However, she fell into a funk so deep between Christmas and New Year's that I decided to let her grieve without my being a party to it.  Her blogging is cathartic to her but not to me.

I flat out don't know what happened to the last one.  Her humor as evidenced in her blog was definitely edgy, but it went completely over the cliff with her New Year's Day post.  It was nasty, evil, mean, and I didn't even read two paragraphs before wondering what happened over her holiday season.   She wrote as if speaking directly in person to each reader.  I have a couple of nicknames, but "Bitch" isn't one of them.

People can whine all they want about the garbage that's on TV, radio, the internet, but in the end, no one's making me listen, watch or read anything I don't want to.  So I exercised my freedom to just say no.

"If I wanted to be called a bitch to my face, I'd still be married."   -- Deputy Chief Brenda Lee Johnson

as if I didn't have enough challenges....

... I've just signed up for blogging all 365 days next year (except for Leap Day, Feb. 29th, which is a day "off."  Gee, thanks.).   I had joined NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) in November but thought I had to post every day on their website.  I got frustrated when their delayed posting mechanism didn't work.  Instead of setting up several posts to be published at a later date, thereby accomplishing a post every day, it actually deleted the post I had just written.  I tried that several times--but the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, isn't it?  So my final post there said enough is enough, go read my blog on my site, not theirs.

But since I've been a very good girl about posting here every day--and Typepad's "publish at a later date" feature does work--I thought I would pick up that gauntlet once again and accept the challenge.  Why not?  What else do I have to do? 

Randomizer is like a book of short stories

Sometimes you just want to wander. It's too late to do anything that requires real brain cells, too early to go to bed. So I was tooting around on NaBloPoMo (gee, that's hard to type) and saw Randomizer.

I've seen references to Randomizer before, but just said, "what the heck is that?" There it was on the tool bar. Click. First random blog... cool! How cool is that? It's like cracking open a book of short stories by different authors and starting to read. Some you like, some you don't... move on. There are some issues that I realize are very important to some people but have no place in my life. Breastfeeding, infertility, rock music, anime... whole categories of things that I need not cram into my brain. It's already crowded enough in there.

On the other hand, I found a really cool blog, Nowhere, IL, and read until I couldn't stay awake any more. I've now added it to my bookmarks of blogs I like to read every day. Today's post was a hoot! I grew up in my own "Hooterville."

So I'm sure part of my routine will be to cruise through Randomizer and read a few more blogs. I like to live vicariously that way.

blogging my life away

Just in case I didn't have enough to do with running the B&B and publishing my personal blog, I've now started one about innkeeping.  I've meant to do this for several years but started with the personal one first just to figure out how to do it, work out the bugs, determine what to say (and what not!). 

This is also in addition to our book review blog, which is tied to the Bottger Mansion website.

Why all the different ones?  What to write?  Obviously, the innkeeping and book review blogs are more "public" and I need to follow those publishing rules:  keep it positive and informative; never write anything that you would be embarrassed to get back to someone or would be detrimental to your business; remember that people reading those are your guests or potential guests.

I finally decided to start the innkeeping blog when I kept saying, "I should write about that."  "Oh, yeah, this keeps coming up."  So I did a Google search on innkeeping blogs and found pretty much the same kind--sales pitches to "stay at our inn."  Funny, the first thing the presenter at the innkeepers' conference said about an innkeeping blog was don't do that.  I was looking to see if anyone is actually writing about running an inn.  Forget Bob Newhart--you're not going to learn about running an inn from that show.  For instance, how often did you ever see guests? 

As for my personal blog, I still try to keep it interesting and informative but on a personal note.  Keep the rants and raves to a minimum, although sometimes I just have to comment on extraordinarily bad customer service experiences, because there's a lesson there as well.  At times we come across really interesting marketing insights that I want to share because, guess what?  Those things apply to life in general, too.

cruising the blogosphere

The other day I posted about some great blogs I found.  Then I used Randomizer to cruise through some more.  Fairly quickly, actually.  Here are the titles.  What do they say to you?

CourtTV informer
On being a sports girl
Diario de Nuestras Tragedias (in Spanish)
Frogalog
Artsyfartsy
My Journal and Journey
Melissa Leithwood
E Flo
Suzanne Says…
Our Young Family
Lcjfyi
Writer Vixen Explains It All
 “A personal zine published once a week, more or less”
 [Her last posting was July 22^nd. That would be “less.”]
 [Another note: I really liked this one.]
“Where are we going?”
Princess of 3 Princes and 1 Knight in Shining Armor
Fantastical Mediocrity
Life art yarn & baby poop
The World Starts and Ends Here
Mama-om

And the list goes on…

some great blogs added to my side bar --->

I've been using Randomizer to cruise through blogs.  There are a lot of "mommy" blogs out there ("aren't my kids the cutest?") and some blogs on very specific topics in which I have no interest.  Thank goodness, they absolutely don't pertain to me, and I can categorically ignore them--breastfeeding, potty training, knitting, rock music--the list goes on.

On the other hand, I've found a couple of really good ones, so I can waste even more of my nonexistent free time reading.  Look for them in my sidebar.

Free Range Gnomes is hilarious.  I figure whoever is writing that one must have been a drama major.  Le Pen Quotidien is a daily drawing by a very talented artist, who I expect someday will be famous.  Proper Course is by a guy who sails Laser sailboats and, fortunately, he writes about other interesting stuff as well, because my technical understanding of sailing is extremely limited.  Nonexistent, actually.

I read other blogs as well, but some of the content can be rather pithy, so I'll keep those to myself.