Resist the artificial hastening
Of my fifteen minutes of fame,
Do not digg my daily dalliances,
Stumble not upon my Stygian stupidities,
And I shall avoid the agar of optimisation
Lest my uncultured concerns become a plague.
Already severely pruned
To bonsai proportions
By living's stealthy ransoms,
I am quite familiar and content
That only ants and beetles
May benefit from
My reduced capacity
For shelter and shade.
Besides, is there really
Infinite room for expansion?
A never ending dilution
Of my essence.
Photo courtesy Bonsai-trees-biz
I have finally understood - the penny has at last dropped - gee, I'm so slow.
Nobody told me - the secret was well concealed, but through exploration, discovery and deep thought, I now see the light.
Blogging actually has a purpose, a mission to fulfil, it is the critical part of the social jigsaw, that up until recently has been missing. A large, vacuous gape - waiting to be filled.
I kick myself for not realising all this before, but here I share with you my valuable insight.
* Like a road that doesn't actually lead anywhere, the important thing is to have traffic. Traffic that constantly circulates, traffic that is searching, enquiring, never settling for long, but just enough to leave a trace of a visit, a calling card.
* The first thing to start writing about is how to increase this traffic. There are so many secrets, well - I should say they were secrets - what readers want is not substance, but simply knowledge of ways to increase traffic. So it stands to reason that to reveal these secrets will attract traffic. Write posts all about keywords, anchor text, contests, SEO, page-ranking, linking, back-linking, 3 way linking, bloggers' social communities, the annual Bloggers' Ball - learn all about leaving comments, leaving shouts, widgets, blogrolls - that's the stuff we want to know about.
* Earning money from traffic is the goal - so to increase the variety of posts on your site even more why not allow yourself to become an extension of the already ubiquitous blight of consumerism, by writing advertising copy.
If you can't write it yourself you can even purchase generic appraisals which simply need some minor modification (copy/paste) to suit the particular product or service that you have chosen to support. You don't even have to think, or in fact have any genuine interest at all - make it up. Why not, in fact, become a catalogue, a cyber-mall, a hoarding - if it earns you some cash.
* Learn the art of concealing tripe behind hype. It's those keywords - the sound bites - that will hint of the gold at the end of the rainbow. As long as you get a visit - job done.
* You are now an integral part of the cogs and wheels of consumerism. But as they whir and spin, they spit out dollars at you - why should you worry.
There's infinite room in cyberworld - what difference does it make.
Your avatar, your username, may achieve a fame that you personally could only dream of.
If blogging held any merit, any promise - I fear it is gradually being dissolved away by the acidic drips of need & greed - so blatant that it reveals itself around every corner.
It lends it a bitter taste - that hints at nobody having anything to say - and that they are only writing at all to gain traffic.
Isn't this some sort of infernal, self serving, pointless cycle going on here?
It reminds me of the story of the life cycle of a particular variety of grass.
The seedlings had to be protected from direct sunlight and needed covering with a matting, suspended over them as they sprouted and grew.
On reaching maturity, the grass was harvested, threshed - and woven into matting - to cover the young seedlings as they grew.
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