babbling blue

Have you heard about NaBloPoMo? It’s National Blog Posting Month, which asserts that bloggers should post to their blog every single day in the month of November.

Why? Who the hell knows! Don’t worry, I’m not participating. First of all, I don’t have the time. Second of all, I am not nearly interesting enough to find something to post every day. There’s just not that much going on in my life. Oh, but the folks at NaBloPoMo have some ideas…

This year, for those of you who suspect you might run out of gas, maybe you’d like to try blogging on a theme. Follow a news story for the month; get deeper into an issue that you want to educate yourself about; keep us abreast of how your yoga practice / daily muffin-eating regime / matchstick Eiffel Tower is progressing.

Umm… daily muffin-eating regime? I think they have just given a strong argument for why you shouldn’t participate in this silliness. If you are going to inundate the blogosphere with such inane drivel just for the sake of having posts, you are going to dilute the effectiveness of blogging in general. Now I know that there are indeed bloggers who do that sort of thing anyway; they either think people out there actually care about all the vapid details of their mundane lives or they are just blogging more as an open diary for themselves than for other people to consume. And don’t even get me started on Twitter.

Regardless, I don’t think posting blog entries for the sake of posting blog entries should be encouraged. By no means do I claim that every (or any) post in this blog is some sort of masterpiece of journalism or satire or . . . anything. But with few exceptions I only post when I have something to say. Not that what I have to say is always interesting, but that’s another matter. . . .

I don’t think NaBloPoMo (what a stupid friggin’ name!) folks realize they are contributing to the poor signal-to-noise ratio that leads many people to feel disdain for blogs and bloggers. Another example of good intentions gone awry.