OK, a confession to start with… or is it to end with? I have discovered that the idle blogger can cheat (at least when using Blogger software) and set up posts on a certain day to be edited later. So smug have I been in this knowledge, that I have left the completion of this entry (started almost a month ago) until today. So what?

Somehow it seems an easy way to appear prolific and organised, as long as you have a thought for the day, you can go back to it later when you are less inspired by how shit your day has been and make it appear that you have a great idea every day of you waking life.

Anyway, the original purpose of this entry was to pick a few holes in the world of the blog. After all, I’m an expert. I had been blogging for a whole week before I took a month’s sabbatical.

I’m sure that there are many blogs that have started wih the best of intentions and then trailed off…

… this is not the first blog I have started and my good intentions have already waned, but there are a few things about blogging that are inherently annoying:

Blog Stardom:

There is a law which I am going to state, which I guess means that I can name it. Humphrey’s Law states that a blog becomes unreadbly obsessed with its own fame about two minutes after it has reached a readership beyond the immediate family of the blogger and more than two of their pets.

Belle du Jour and the one about cooking stuff are both cases in point. By the time they had come to the public eye their central theme had become being in the public eye. Sort of a Victoria Beckham effect – famous for being famous.

Reverse Entry:

There is probably a way of doing this, but I haven’t found it: the narrative in a blog is always reversed – the last thing to happen is the first thing you read. Being a bit of a meat and two veg kind of reader, I don’t appreciate being stranded at the end of a narrative and having to wade back to the begining to find out what the whole thing is about.

Themes:

Cooking your way through a cook book is not exactly brain science or rocket surgery, but it does create a good blog. Have sales of Mastering the Art of French Cooking rocketed, or are we all living the vicarious pleasure of reading about someone who has? The idea of a serious theme which actually informs the public of serious issues is great, but it is rather worrying that people working in corporate and public sector jobs seem to be being discouraged from writing anything, and indeed their employers have the power to take sanctions against whistleblowers and those who care about their work with the ambulance service and the police force.

Anyway, I’m going to persevere with the form and see how we get on. Perhaps by the time you next read this I will be talking about my publishing deal.

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