What Blogging Isn't (Featuring the World's Worst Blog)

David Weinberger, co-author of 'The Cluetrain Manifesto' is giving the keynote right now. Just on the screen was his example of The World's Worst Blog.


It's pretty bad. The amazing thing to me isn't how bad it is -- it's that someone thought that it was a good idea.


[Update: The World's Worst Blog was finally retired a few weeks
after this entry was originally posted. Since you can't see it, here
are some of the reasons why it was the World's Worst Blog:



* It wasn't actually a blog. Their whole site was a big Flash mess.
They had a section that was called a blog, but it just had some dated
entries. There were no comments, no external links, no interaction with
readers and visitors. It was clear that some marketing folks wanted to
cash in on a hot term, "blogging" they read about somewhere, without
understanding the implications.



* The "blog's" entries were obviously some marketing committee's
creation, describing the psychotic behavior the author purportedly did
to acquire that particular brand of gum. In the comments to the entry in BusinessWeek's BlogSpotting blog,
some posters suggested the name "flogs", to describe fake blogs set up
to shill for a product. This violates one of the cardinal rules of
blogging, authenticity.



* The primary interaction on the "blog" was a "game" (sorry for all the
quotes, but you'll see why I used them in a second) that consisted of
having the user click and hold their mouse button over a particular
spot on the screen. It was the online version of one of those "keep one
hand on the car" contest, only without the payoff of a car at the end.



* Now, I agree that people were piling on a little -- it wasn't really
that big of a deal -- there's a lot of stupid marketing out there, and
if people were talking about the site, that's something right there. It
was just kind of annoying to bloggers to see someone slap a label of
"blog" on something that obviously wasn't, just to get a little cachet
from it.]



There are a few lessons that can be taken from this -- obviously, not
all subject matter might be suitable for blogging. Then again,
marketers are a pretty creative bunch -- if they can position their
products as representative of a specific lifestyle, maybe they can
build a blog (or something interesting to the blog world) around that.



From the BlogOn conference, an
example mentioned was from the TAG Body Spray people (or was it Axe?) -- they are
essentially selling deodorant, but their TV commericals and online
presence are all about an aspirational lifestyle -- they say, if you use our spray deodorant, you'll pick up girls.



Not sure where the hook for gum is, but there's got to be something better than what they had.]


Thanks -- Joe.




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