Stop Blogging

Stop Using Big Words You Don't Understand

2008-03-29T11:26:00.005-04:00

Sesquipedalian predilections warrant interminable vigilance.

Verily, vivacious nomenclature decries salient considerations of distinguishability. Abandon waterlogged lexicons for perspicuous verbiage.

Discontinue inclinations toward Brobdingnagian libretto. Procure alternative bureaucratese.

Stop Blogging.

Don't Blog About Holidays

2008-03-21T12:19:00.015-04:00

Stop writing about holidays and their meaning to you.

Easter celebrates rebirth, and there's nothing original about that. At this point, it's merely regurgitation. (And that's for the birds.)

You believe your material is heartwarming, topical, and original. We find it trite. In fact, it's easier to reconcile egg-laying rodents than it is to find value in your holiday post.

Additionally, don't expect any sympathy on your rough, chocolate-free Lent. No one cares. We certainly don't. In fact, you could probably stand to lose some weight.

Start with your blog: Stop blogging.

Stop Blogging for Lent

2008-02-08T10:10:00.000-05:00

For the disciples among you, give up blogging for Lent.

This exercise in self-discipline will teach you that blogging is a compulsive and nasty habit (like smoking or gambling) that should be eradicated. (And, for the same reasons.)

If Jesus is not your lord and savior, give up blogging for Lent.

Blogging afflicts believers and non-believers alike. Don't be fooled by lecherous teachings to the contrary. (Recall: doctors once had a preferred, healthier brand of cigarette. And roulette table.)

Spend your extra time helping children, the needy, the homeless, or the whales. When you're done, don't blog about it you quaestuary.

Don't Repeat Yourself

2008-02-02T02:04:00.000-05:00

Don't repeat yourself.

And don't make us tell you again.

Use Relevant Images

2008-01-31T14:56:00.000-05:00

If you feel the need to include a picture with each post, use a relevant image or don't include one at all.

We understand that you may feel compelled to add a photo to "kick it up a notch" and spark ocular excitement with visual cues. But, your photo isn't relevant to what you're saying and it detracts from any point your post may have had.

It makes you even less credible.

Additionally, do not attempt to mitigate a loosely associated image with your post simply because you enjoy the photo. The justification is mismatched, like a squirrelly preteen in a sumo match. (See how we did that?)

Use images sparingly and only when it enhances the punchline.

Activity of the day: Calculate your Irrelevant Image Ratio (IIR)

Count the number of images in your blog. Call this i. Now, count the number of those that were actually relevant. Call that r.

r / i = IRR

If your IRR is not 1.000 (note the degree of precision in this number), delete every irrelevant image.

Less is more. Stop blogging.

Stop Commenting

2008-01-26T03:10:00.000-05:00

If you cannot write an intelligent post, keep your comments to yourself.

In the blogosphere, comments are visceral and reactionary instead of meaningful and thoughtful. Good writers put effort into their blog posts and should be rewarded with insightful responses. Instead, their work contends with lackluster statements of adoration, condemnation, and divagation.

The term itself is a misnomer. In practice, commenting is more like consuming a four-course meal, chugging Colonblow, and refusing to leave the dinner table until after you've done your business.

Worse yet, commenters comment on comments, clouding the post's intended message with questions of sexual preference and allusions to Hitler. The banter grows longer than the actual post, nullifying any hint of utility. Or relevance, for that matter.*

But for you, dear reader, your comments are clearly half-hearted ploys intending to attract readers to a blog that you shouldn't have.

We're calling you out.

Stop commenting.

*Which leads us to our next point: monitor your comments and get rid of the feature. Better still, stop blogging.

Don't Apologize for Not Blogging

2008-01-21T12:24:00.001-05:00

Do not apologize for an extended absence. No one cares where you were. It's a wasted gesture-- just like your blog.

Do not blog simply because you have not blogged in a while. Your post will be sub-par and will qualify for abortion.

Better yet, stop blogging entirely: your piddling audience most certainly needs to find other sources of entertainment. And, perhaps, get a life.

We suspect the same can be said for you.

Your Top 10 List Is Worthless: The Top 10 Reasons

2008-01-11T16:52:00.000-05:00

Often introduced with time-wasting, content-devoid, redundant lead-ins, your Top 10 Lists* fail to deliver. Allow us to show you why:

Readers cannot remember 10 things.
Your audience can barely remember one concept, let alone ten. Focus on one precise, concise thought per post: it is more likely to attract dedicated readers and not click-through junkies.
Your list caters to Digg, not to your audience.
A well-focused blog serves as a Top 10 List (and more) without arbitrary consolidation and bounded enumeration. Your list is simply self-serving and masterbatory.
Itemized conceptualization abstracts concrete, actionable utility.
Stick to grocery lists.
Reverse-ordered lists are difficult to format in HTML.
Aesthetics and order matter. Countdowns, however, give the illusion that your Top 10 list features relative ranking. Even Letterman knows in practice that's bullshit.
They are predictable.
And explanations are trivial and obviously written hastily.
The Number "10" is completely arbitrary.
Be honest: you decided to write a Top 10 list. Then, you wrote down the first 10 things that came to you. If you couldn't make it to 10, you merely cut it to whatever number's the flavor of the month.
One item (or more) merely pads the list.
Casually included somewhere near the middle, this witless numeral brings the list to a tidy 10. It is loosely relevant and summarily forgotten.
There are already too many Top 10 Lists.
Because there are too many blogs, there are too many Top 10 Lists. Most readers have grown tired of the format. If they are still reading them, they're delusional or asleep. Most readers tune out by number eight.
They fade.
You simply don't have the stamina to hold anyone's interest. No wonder you're alone.
You cannot remember 10 things.
Your audience can barely remember one concept, let alone ten. And neither can you.

Déjà vu?

Top 10 lists are predictable, arbitrary, and difficult to remember; thus, their authors conclude with clever quips to tie it all together. Inasmuch, the final note could replace the entire list as it is usually thoughtful and more delicately written than the list itself.

Top 10 Lists are worthless. Stop Blogging.

--

*including the web's favorite variations: The Top 8, The Top 5, and the Top 20.

Pro-Abortion

2008-01-09T01:41:00.000-05:00

For mediocre blog posts, we are neither pro-choice nor pro-life: we are pro-abortion.

Readers care not about your fatuous posts nor the great effort required to make them understandable. Readers demand only satisfaction. Your toils are irrelevant.

Abort your post if it is anything short of exceptional. Inasmuch, if none of your posts are exceptional (which goes for nearly all of you), stop blogging.

Activity of the day: Calculate your Post Abortion Rate (PAR)

Save your abortions as drafts and count your published posts. Add these two to get attempts.

Calculate PAR:

posts / attempts

If your scope is juvenile (i.e. Cute Overload), your PAR should be close to 0.9. (God help you if you 'write' for this blog.)

If you tackle Social Science, Causality Inference, and Statistical Modeling, you should have no problem calculating your PAR and it should be close to 0.5.

If you find yourself Philosophizing, take a moment to re-evaluate your writing habits (and, for some of you, your life decisions). Your PAR is nearly 1.0 but should be closer to 0.05. You write too much and say too little. You are not Camus. You are not Nietzsche. Your audience cares little what you think.

If hell is other people, their blogs are rampant Devil-spawn.

Abort your abominations. Stop Blogging.

The Doctorow Effect

2008-01-05T18:44:00.000-05:00

Do not invoke Cory Doctorow in an effort to publicize your blog.

Mr. Doctorow will not be amused. You will not be "slashdotted".

In the unlikely event your ruminations* become (fleetingly) notable, expect harsh criticism and Internet memes created exclusively to nullify your personal credibility.

So, ask yourself, is it really worth attracting Cory Doctorow's following to your pithless blathering?

No. Stop Blogging.

--

*defined as cud-chewing, not thought.

Check Your Facts

2008-01-04T18:26:00.000-05:00

FACT:*

68.9% of bloggers don't spell check.
87.3% of bloggers don't fact check.
77.2% of bloggers don't proofread.

Yet, 100% of readers want and expect these things.

Fact check your blogs. Don't pull a valleywag.

--

*These are not, in fact, facts; they are made up. You believed them, didn't you? And to you, trigger-happy types, I'll bet you blogged about these facts, lambasting your "peers" for being in the the non-(spell/fact)-checking population. Hypocrites.

New Years Posts

2008-01-01T15:07:00.000-05:00

Each New Years, bloggers ceremoniously reflect on their year's worth of efforts, citing highlights and making resolutions for the new year.

Activity of the day: Read your old posts and make a New Year's resolution.

Actually, don't bother. We wouldn't subject even you to your fruitless musings. Here's your New Year's Resolution:

Stop Blogging.

Proper Post Proportions

2007-12-27T15:53:00.001-05:00

Posting size and frequency should be proportionate to purpose and popularity.

Focused bloggers can afford to post frequently. That discipline yields readership. Examples: Feminist Law Professors, Engadget, ICANHASCHEEZBURGER.

Note that post lengths are inversely proportionate to post frequency: either posts are lengthy and occasional, or short and plentiful.

Also note that you need not read every word to get the point.

Activity of the day: Calculate your Blog Post Proportion (BPP).

Divide your Average Post Length by your Average Post Frequency. This gives you the number of words you expect your readers to read within a certain time period.

What's an appropriate BPP? Well, let's consider Scoble:

It would take the average American, reading at 250-300 words per minute, ten minutes to merely sift through today's 2,300 words of content across 8 different posts... save nothing for the 30 hyperlinks embedded in each post.

Is Robert Scoble worth 10 (or more) minutes of your day? Every day?

No.

Yet, your turd of a blog most likely contains as high, if not higher, BPP. Can you hold a reader's attention for 10 minutes a day, every day?

No. Neither can Scoble.

By comparison: this post, at 207 words, takes the average American less than a minute to read.

Why You Bore Me

2007-12-24T01:36:00.000-05:00

You don't get to the point.

See that? I handed you the punchline. Whereas you, you meandering peasant, open with wandering prolegomena and half-baked musings without semblance of cogent thought.

Take this moment to apply the following exercise to the last thing you've written so that we may quantify how much you bore me.

Activity of the day: Calculate your Lead-in Logorrhea Index (LLI)

Identify the clause that contains the punchline and count the words in that clause. Call this x. Now, count every word (including parentheticals and numerical statistics) leading up to that clause. Call this y.

If x is less than 10, the LLI is:

y / (10 - x)

If x is 10 or greater, the LLI is:

(y + 10) * (x - 8)

Punchlines greater than ten words incur a hefty penalty.

If you cannot identify the punchline, your score is ∞.
A perfect score is zero-- which is precisely how much you should publish.

Stop Blogging.

Pure Genius

2007-12-22T19:57:00.000-05:00

Evaluated by a highly non-scientific website, our blog need be read by Geniuses.

Sadly, this is not you.

In the future, we'll refrain from dazzling you with our lexicon and impeccable grammar. Instead, we'll merely post pictures of cats and embed YouTube videos featuring laughing babies and dancing robots.

Plebeians.

Blogging Alternatives

2007-12-07T03:45:00.000-05:00

Your greasy little fingers can't help themselves: you yearn to express yourself.

So learn to express yourself.

Read

Before you run, you walk. Before you walk, you crawl. Crawlers learn to walk through imitation, so start here: Malcolm Gladwell; Wonkette; Stop Blogging.

Meanwhile, learn the rules of effective writing. Buy these books: The Elements of Style; Eats(,) Shoots & Leaves.
Journal

Share your words with only the people who care to read them. And, for now, that's you (and only you). Write whatever you want. Try it using a pen and paper-- it forces slow, deliberate thought.

Don't erase. Write something and mean it.
Review

Find a good editor to critique your work. Hand her a red pen and instruct her to be ruthless. Read her comments. Read her comments again. Ask questions. Rewrite, rinse, repeat.
Micro-blog

Join a micro-blogging website like Twitter. Learn how it works. Follow some people who share your interests.

Get to the point. Use only the space provided. If it's worth saying, 140 characters is more than sufficient.

The previous sentence contains only 51 characters. The previous paragraph, 108. This paragraph, 114. Get the idea?
Voice

This blog employs laconic styling.

This is our voice. Find your own.

As a service, we'll critique your writing if you've completed these five steps. It's one of the ways we put-our-money-where-our-mouth-is.

Send it in to 'stopblogging' at GMail.

Ignore The Sidebar Ads

2007-11-30T01:55:00.000-05:00

If you plaster your site with ads, you implicitly hate your readers.

Please take this moment to reflect on what we really think of you.

Adsense does not a profitable blog make-- good writing does that. Readers respect good writers, and good writers are summarily compensated with readers.

Readers are money, so treat them that way. Invest in your readership and they'll increase in value. Spend your readership by delivering them ads or worthless dribble and you'll go broke. (Or worse, debt.)

Activity of the day: Calculate your blog rate of return (BRoR).

Take your adsense revenue and divide that by your blogging hours. If your BRoR is below $7, you're (much) better off waiting tables. Stop Blogging.

Delete your Blog

2007-11-30T01:22:00.000-05:00

Stop Blogging.

Logorrhea clogs the Internet like cancer to the colon.

And, like colon cancer, the treatment is obvious: remove it. Otherwise, you're pandering to an ever-expanding mass that disrupts everyone's shit.

Urge bloggers to stop blogging. Offer cash incentives. Shut it down.

Blogger.com: Go to "Settings" and find the "Delete Blog" button at the bottom of the page.
WordPress.com: Go to "Options" and find the "Delete Blog" tab.
For your domain: Delete your domain or stop payment on your credit card.

See how easy it is?

The world will thank you for dismissing these worthless weblogs written by witless wonders.