The Last Word: Well, I’ll be bloggered

OPINION: Lately our customers have all been carrying on about blogs. Yeah, that’s what I thought too, but they’re not talking about Dutch footwear, they’re talking about personal publishing -- whatever that is supposed to mean.

Apparently, it is now considered way cool to keep a diary and let everyone read the thing on the internet. Nobody spared a thought for Miss Marple when all this started. How is she ever going to uncover the victim’s long lost diary and reveal the identity of the murderer if the diary wasn’t even missing?

Then again, maybe a blog is insurance against getting murdered. Nobody would dare do away with you if they got a menacing mention online the day before the dastardly deed.

You could get unlucky I suppose and become the target of a cocaine cartel, in which case they’d still murder you, as well as everyone who ever read your blog. Maybe that’s a good reason not to read blogs -- you don’t want to end up as an accidental witness to your own demise.

Anything that attracts lots and lots of punters is just an unrealised business opportunity as far as we’re concerned at Rabid Reseller. Once we’d seen a program about blogging on A Recent Affair we wasted no time setting up a blogatorium in a disused corner of our virtual warehouse and inviting everyone to log in and blog away.

Next thing you know the blog artists took offence because we were charging people to read our blogsite, but this is a business and you don’t get nothing for nothing here.

That forced us to start our own blog, outlining just what we thought of the rest of the ungrateful bloggers and what they could do about it if they didn’t like it.

Of course that soon got us involved in a blog war and several denial-of-service attacks, which might sound bad at first but the extra traffic allowed us to jack up our advertising rates, and with every blog crosslinked to every other blog we’re talking massive click-through.

Is there anyone out there with something interesting to say every day that isn’t too busy being interesting to waste time blogging? We didn’t think so.

The topics for discussion on these blogs is invariably mind-numbingly banal to the point of drawing a nice bath of warm water and contemplating changing the water colour with the deft application of some arterial artistry. Now a blog about that might actually be interesting so long as there were accompanying pictorials, assuming of course some eye candy appeal inherent in the bored-out-of-his-or-her skull blogaholic.

Nobody really cares what these Neanderthal nobodies think about, well, anything really. If it wasn’t for their friends and relatives keeping the blogometer ticking over they’d realise that nobody is really reading their boring bleatings. Well, nobody was listening until we got slashdotted. We don’t normally complain about increased traffic and better click-rates but a denial-of-service is like a summer shower compared to the category five storm unleashed by slashdotters.

A word of advice lest you find yourself headed down the same pathway to perdition -- don’t blog about open source. You’re on safer ground blogging about religion or politics than you are prattling about penguins.

This applies whether you are for or against the little tuxedo-wearing waddlers. Far worse than death by a thousand pecks from piqued penguinistas are the endless emails telling you that you don’t really understand open source so why are you supporting it anyway because you are obviously just a paid stooge for the purveyors of proprietary programming. We’re not making that bit up -- they really write like that. It takes us all week with a dictionary before we know whether to be annoyed or pleased.

So after all the fuss, we’re back where we started, except that now we have to maintain this blogsite and we can’t charge anybody for looking at the thing.

Worse, we have to read the damn blogs, just in case they say anything that could get us sued. Now half our staff are making claims for cruel and unusual punishment and the other half are submitting invoices from their therapists.

Serial boredom can do that.

Gotta go, customers waiting!