Capturing Chaos

Changing your Stumbleupon topic preferences and then hitting the Stumble button fifty or sixty times a day can turn up all sorts of interesting information. It’s not always just about the subjects that people are writing about, but the various approaches, the number of people writing in a given area, and how much of what comes up is old but still good — the evergreens. Odd but interesting perspectives that developers of Stumbleupon didn’t necessarily have in mind when they started the site.

Two topics that I like to Stumble are writing and blogging. The most obvious thing that jumps out when you’ve been hitting the button for days and days is that most people have nothing original to say. The majority of blogs about blogging are there to make money by telling you how to make money. There must be thousands of them, most of them fairly obscure and probably struggling to fulfill their own promises — “How to get thousands of readers for your new blog,”  “How to use AdSense to build an overnight fortune.”

The majority of writing blogs follow much the same pattern; “How to get started in freelancing,” “How to promote your writing career,” “How to write a killer article, use ‘it’s’ properly, write an attention-getting title,” and on and on. Thousands upon thousands of blogs and websites, all trying to win a little slice of the attention pie. And they just keep coming.

So here I am, writing about writing, and handing out advice. What’s my advice? If you’re going to write about blogging or writing, do something different, for heaven’s sake!

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