Five reasons blogging is killing good content

In the old days everybody making his life online knew content was king. The best sites were those with the most useful information and well written articles attracted loyal, often educated, audiences. Nobody cared about fancy Ajax based widgets, clicks on ads or lots of links to social networks and bookmarking services.

Indeed, content and good writing were important back in the oldies.

Then, around 1999, blogs became the next big thing and suddenly everybody was adding tons of garbage to the Web. King Content started a long and painful death in the hands of zillions of bloggers due to many reasons, I'd like to share just five of them. This is why I think blogging is killing good content.

1. Everybody can blog

Publishing content online a decade ago required more planning than today. People needed to invest some time thinking what they were going to say and how to say it best. Dude, they even hired guys like me to help them build their websites. The smartest ones listened and cared about crafting quality content and great experiences for their visitors.

And don't believe those who tell you that before blogs nobody could update their sites without a wizards's help. Content management systems had been around long before blogs. No, blogs aren't the heroes who rescued poor Joe the newbie from updating hell.

But it's true that services like Blogger made everything easier, perhaps too easy. Now all big Joe had to do was fill a form and presto! newbiejoe.blogspot.com is ready to show the world all the fun our new blogger friend had while bowling last night with Billy and Jay. Sure, like if we cared that blonde chick looked at you for a nanosecond brother Joe.

Maybe I'm being a little brutal here and Joe deserves a space online for sharing those exciting moments of his life with family and friends. Hey Joe, you knew about MySpace and the dancing bear backgrounds, right?

Let's leave Joe alone, at least he's being honest. I'm more worried about the other bloggers, the ones that don't know shit about writing, more about this in the next reason, or any other topic and pretend to. I'm not saying that everybody should be an expert to publish online but at least they should be responsible with their readers. There are many unsuspecting individuals out there that believe everything they watch on TV, I'm sure many more also believe everything they read in blogs.

If you're a blogger, want to write about photography and can't tell an SLR from a point and shoot you should tell your readers. You don't need to know it all, just tell the truth and stop pretending you're a hot shot because you have a million silly posts, a multitude of little buttons and a pretty Wordpress theme that fifty thousand other blogs use.

In many cases blog readers suck as much as the bloggers they follow. They don't know how to add useful relevant comments and a few leave their email addresses around wishing the solutions to all their problems will arrive via inbox heaven.

Yes, everybody can blog, we live in a beatiful world and long live free open knowledge but please stop filling the tubes with bullshit!

2. Not everybody can write

Have you read Strunk and White's The Elements of Style at least a couple of times in your life? Haven't you? Then don't write any more words until you do it.

Creating a blog is easy, booting up your laptop and punching the keys is now a reflex, like answering that tiny cell in your right pocket. Filling the Web with your words shouldn't be much harder than that, right? Fucking wrong! If you think that way please stop reading this, you are beyond salvation and I hate helping people who doesn't want to make the effort.

I always like to think I'm a writer, ok, an aspiring writer, instead of just a blogger. There's a huge different.

Writers love to read, are obsessed with words and suffer when they see anybody mistreating the language. Writers care for their craft and think about readers but even more about what they'd like to read. Good writers are selfish dudes more interested in their own reading pleasure than in everybody else's; and that's how great writing is born.

Bloggers just punch keys and publish anything online. Period.

I know I'll get many comments about how much bloggers know about SEO or revenue models. Know what? That doesn't mean much. Content is still king. If you don't know how to write and your content is composed of a bunch of senseless stupidly crafted words you won't get anywhere.

If you want to help making the Web a better place, read a lot, learn to write and create great content. Got it?

Oh, what's that?, you are here just for the money? Ok, that takes me to the next reason.

3. Most bloggers do it for a fistful of dollars

For many money kills inspiration, others don't even have words like inspiration and creativity in their vocabulary. It's easy to tell; browse a little and you'll find a hugenormous amount of horrible blogs cluttered with advertisment.

As somebody who makes part of its living from writing online I know how it is. We invest time in our sites and many get unrestricted access to our content. A few bucks to cover our costs or even a little more wouldn't hurt, right? Well, it depends.

I'm all in favor of supporting those who create quality content to help a loyal audience, even a small one, and somebody has to pay for all the work, hosting and extra coffee. Good karma isn't just enough.

Advertising, affiliate marketing and the selling of information products are perhaps the best ways of making money out of the content publishing business but that shoud still be secondary to producing good and relevant content. And relevancy is the key word here, a very important part of the unwritten agreement with our readers. You shouldn't fill your site with ads and products that your reader wouldn't need or that you wouldn't ever use.

I know I may not following my own advice in this point at this site and I'm working on it. The goal is that every product I promote here should be as useful to my audience as the content that I produce.

Unfortunately not every blogger out there thinks the same and they are in just for the quick buck. There's no passion or deep knowledge of any topic. These money loving bloggers don't give a damn about the users' expectations. Will you just click the stupid ads and get the hell out of my site? Thank you.

You know that somebody has touched the bottom of the blogging scale when he or she writes, and I quote: Hello Out There! If you're new to the Internet (or just computers in general) and are looking around to see what's available on the Internet you can read my blog and find out what I have discovered on the Internet.'. If that blogger isn't doing it just for the pennies I don't know what the heck is happening there.

4. Useless search results

With so many blogs out there talking about what somebody has discovered on the Internet and other silly things it's no surprise that a few millions of pages full with this crap will get to the search results. The net effect is we all waste time, users and the smart guys working at the search engines.

A lot of irrelevant information hit our screens and some naive users even click on ads to escape from the nightmarish blogs, making the owners a few cents richer, or in some weird cases millionaires.

But this is not an article about making millions, we're talking about offering your users good content, these bloggers just care about the Benjamins and King Content is still dying.

5. Linking madness

The final reason why I think blogging is killing good content is just a few stupid words:

Via: some-other-guy-site.com

If they call that blogging please get an axe and chop my head off right now.

Can't these via bloggers at least add their opinion on the matter? I hate it when Google takes me to one of these blogs just to realize I have to make another jump to get to the source.

Stop in the name of content

I don't like what I see or where we're going with so many useless blogs online. Many will say the nature of the Net is to be open and they are right, that openness is the cause for many of us having great fun jobs. I just can do two things, write an article like this, trying to save the King, and keep doing my best to offer great content to the few fans I may have out there.

Long live King Content!