In blogging, don't publish crapYou should thank me. Really. You should thank me because today I applied the first rule of blogging: don’t publish crap.

If you’ve read my blog, Awakened Moments, for the past couple of days, you know I’m participating in a Problogger challenge. In it, every day for a week I am given a style of post in which to write, and my job is to generate content in that style. So far, first there was a list post, then a FAQ post. Today the challenge was a review post.

The problem was that I got most of the way through a post reviewing organizer/planner styles, which I thought was a pretty good idea. Except that when I was almost done I read it and I realized that it sucked. Editing wasn’t going to fix it.

Here’s my review of my review post: Good premise. Decent organization. Has promise. Reading it is painful, and makes me want to slit my wrists.

Total. Blogging. Fail.

Which made me think, wouldn’t the world be a better place right now if people just didn’t publish crap? Not just blogging, mind you. Better yet, maybe if we didn’t say stupid crap that popped into our heads in the name of authenticity. Really, it’s making me depressed reading it every day.

Politicians say stupid, stupid things, having apparently lost all impulse control – yes, you know who I mean – and then people post insults about how insulting he is, and then other people post things about how he’s better than her and she lies too, and still other people post things about how it’s not really a waste of a vote to vote for someone who can’t possibly win and anyway, who cares if it leads to the unthinkable?

About 30% of it is researched at all, and only about 10% of that is researched in a serious way with multiple sources.

note: 74.3% of statistics are made up on the spot

No one is convincing anyone of anything, except maybe that we’re all losing our collective mind, what’s left of it.

So there you go. I followed the first rule of blogging and didn’t publish a crappy post today. You can thank me later.

Dr. Les Kertay