…but what can I do? Besides look to The Clash for inspiration, I mean.
Miss Judith recently berated the rest of the Chicks for not writing much…well, she did it quite nicely, I hasten to add. Still, it really made me think about why I haven’t been writing lately, and the reason is simple: I’m bored out of my freaking mind right now.
There is definitely a lot going on with the industry, but so much of what is out there for our consumption deals with personal issues. This person doesn’t like THIS one, this idiot thinks another idiot was rude, this asshole thinks that someone was wrong to criticise him or her for making a truly stupid analogy, etc. Several of my good friends, people that I have the utmost respect for (plus Rob Kerry, ha!), have taken a LOT of heat over things ranging from speaking their mind, nicely of course, to trying to do the right thing and prevent Sphinn from becoming even more of a suburban high school drama. If you like gossip and silly antics, you’re probably happy right now. If you actually give a damn about anything else, good luck finding much about it.
As much as people like to talk about how meaningful things other than link development are, from what I see, not much else truly means all that much. Since I own a link development firm, talking about it in this blog doesn’t really interest me…I LIVE it. Otherwise, what’s left? The newest search engine that MAY compete with Google? Whether Yahoo and MSN will merge? How to prevent people from snooping on your site? Yet ANOTHER piece about how to properly code a robots.txt file? You can see where I’m going…Boredom City. Consequently, I am struggling to write these days. There is simply nothing that I haven’t said, or that another SEO Chick hasn’t said, or that one of you hasn’t said. There are so many bloggers out there blogging about the same things right now. You can read 10 different opinions on one tiny little tidbit, all written within an hour of each other. While it’s nice to read differing voices, sometimes it becomes a bit difficult to actually want to add to the noise.
I’m not bored with what I DO every day, actually, nor am I bored with the industry in general. I am simply bored with writing about it, because the online space is becoming incredibly cluttered with people who seem to know absolutely nothing about anything; they just want to create disturbance. They harass people in comments, they trash everyone who says anything of any value, and they attract like-minded followers who, in turn, attract their attention and they feed off each other. Instead of joining in, I’d rather focus on making sure my company makes a profit, and that my clients get what they pay for. I’d rather watch Father Ted DVDs and order broccoli and tomato pizza. I’d rather watch “Control” again (spoiler alert! Ian Curtis DIES at the end!!) even though it makes me cry and I become depressed for days, spending money on a variety of crap that I don’t need, and eating lots of chocolate doughnuts. I’d rather talk to Flora and Tw@ and make rude comments about Liza’s Facebook photos. Those activities, however, don’t make for good blog fodder. Well, the conversations with Flora and Tw@ would but I don’t want to incur the wrath of all the people we constantly talk trash about so…
Take a look at the current (as of this writing, obviously, I mean) headline stats on Sphinn: 8 on the front page are about social media in one form or another, whether it’s fake profiles or Digg; 3 are about Cuil; 4 are pieces dealing with numbers of either “this many experts say x” or “this many reasons to do or not to do y”; and the rest are all variations on themes we see all the time like new Firefox extensions or what’s wrong with WordPress. Honestly, I understand that there are many people just starting out in the industry, but how many ultimate guides to SEO do we truly need? We’re also seeing tons of recaps of various conferences, further reducing the desire of many people to actually attend these once enormously popular events. Now, it could be argued that Sphinn isn’t representative of what’s going on in the industry, and as much as I would like to believe that that is indeed true, I really don’t, sadly. BO-ring.
So, until there’s a major Google Dance or people start going to federal prison for buying links, I really don’t have all that much to say unless anyone is interested in which bands I’m going to see this summer. I’ll continue to discuss anything interesting with the people I trust on IM or Facebook, or make prank phone calls.
