Blogging Advice From the A-Listers

Hi folks -- so I was checking out the blog of a fiend of mine this morning (as you can see, I'm a little behind today), when I came across a not-completely-unrantlike entry of his with his thoughts on How to Be a More Effective Blogger.

In this entry, he was agreeing with blogger Miss Rogue, who had blogged a piece decrying the current trend of "A-List" bloggers who blog their advice to the little bloggers of the blogosphere, gracing them (okay, us) with their rules on how to be more effective bloggers.

Rules? For blogging? Come on, once you get past "try not to look like a total illiterate" and "share the link love with people who link to you," there really shouldn't be that much in the way of rules (well, besides the Golden Rule, but that goes for everything).

Anyway, if you don't pay attention to such things, A-List bloggers are the ones at the top of the blog food chain -- they're Serious Bloggers, in the Technorati Top 100, speaking at conferences and being interviewed on TV magazine shows. You know, the kind of people who actually care who wins a Bloggie award.

Like I've said to a bunch of people who've had the misfortune to hear me, we bloggers exist in a curious and unique historical position, in that blogging is mature enough so that it's very (maybe overly?) influential, but still new enough that it's not yet ubiquitious.

As a result, that means there that a lot of egotistical A-List bloggers with an overinflated sense of their importance to society, doing a lot of navel-gazing and spraining their arms patting each other on the back.

Since I don't travel in those rarified circles, I can sit back in my comfy chair and agree with those who say:

* Blog for yourself, not for other people.
* Try not to worry about it too much.
* Don't take blogging too seriously.

Anyway, if you want to see how the other half lives, check out some of the links and commenters in Miss Rogue's entry, and see for yourself.

Oh, and if you want to get technical, I had been scanning through the new
entries of a bunch of my friends's blogs, in a folder I have set up on
my Mac's feedreader program (NetNewsire Lite; it's freeware if you're interested and you use Mac OSX 10.2.8 or higher).

Thanks -- Joe