Blogging VS The World

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This is written by Tyler Durden

November 2006. Romania. I decided to add an element into the romanian blogosphere, an element that might shake it up so badly that people wouldn’t even know what hit ‘em. And that element, my friends, is a blog corecting the language errors of other blogs. And a purpose I had: get the blog on the front page of the most visited blog in Romania, in under 1 month. To ruin the surprise, I managed to achieve my goal in just a week’s time. This is my story.

Being only a humble second year journalist, I wasn’t (and am not) an authority in the field of grammar, semantics or linguistics in general. What I possesed was something that all of us have, but are to afraid to use it: better judgement, the ability to criticise other people’s work or – more general – speak your mind.

After countless days in which my wordpress domain remained in an incapacited, almost retarted form, I decided to act upon it. Assault it with my cunning plans to achieve undeserved popularity. First day came and gone and there were already 10 posts on my blog. I started commenting on people’s posts, telling them an error had been detected (as if I was an R2-D2 wannabe, bent on world domination and mistake correction). Fairly quickly, more and more people started gathering on the site and commenting on my methods and expressing their concern regarding my identity. But I had bigger fish to fry. Good things come to those who wait.

Day two and more mistakes, more blogs and even more comments. People cheering, people verbally attacking me, as if I was the reason they had poor linguistic knowledge. Most mistakes were typos, but mistakes nonetheless.

By day three, I had already visited about 30 different blogs started receiving vengeful comments. They would end up eating their words, as their blogs would appear on the front page.

Day four was rather important to the evolution of the blog and to fulfilling my dastardly plan to become famous in under a month. That day I discoved the blog stats, integrated in the wordpress dashboard. “My god!” I thought, “Over 100 views/day?”. I couldn’t believe my eyes: people were actually reading this? Paying attention to it? “Then it can’t be that hard to get to where I want.” I said.

Day five, day six – I finally got an email address (loads of thanks towards gmail) and started responding to the people commenting on the site. And then everything came to pieces (or so I thought) on day six, where I myself have made an syntax error on my blog. That unleashed hell. I was quoted, corrected and put in my place. Hard. Then, out of the blue, a knight in shining armour came to my rescue: a tenth grade blogger approached me in a chatroom and we started talking about this and that-mostly about the (now) controversial blog. To my surprise, he posted an entry on his blog, stating that I had NOT made a mistake and that people were just over zealous (I was receiving mistakes via email, people were really hating other people and were demanding punishment!). Then, once again, this stirred up the romanian blogosphere and people were commenting left and right, bringing up the weirdest reasons why I should quit blogging (Just die; you suck et cetera).

On the seventh day, I found out I had “too much free time on my hands”. But hey, I was a hit. The statistics said so. And statistics don’t lie (do they?).

All the fear and loathing came upon me on the eighth day, when I tried reasoning, via email, with a fellow that really had it in for me: “Your blog sucks. NO! YOUR B-L-O-G sucks! Read my lips, mister! It sucks. Nobody reads it. Shoot yourself.” Of course, those aren’t his exact words, but keep in mind, he was a deluted poor youngster, to say the least. Me? I knew what I was waiting for and I was smart enough to wallow in my triumph. I had made it to the front page of the most read blog in Romania and the guy liked my idea. “Great!”, I said. “What now?”

Oh, and I thought I was off the hook. Boy, was I wrong…Podcasts! I was featured in an audio podcast on another blog. Not really pleasant things to hear about something you’ve devoted a week of your life to, but hey, there is no such thing as BAD publicity, right? Turns out, the guy doing the podcast is an old buddy of mine, somehow time has split us up and we disconnected in the fog of time.

This is where my story ends…or at least, this is where I’ve gotten so far.

Conclusions?

1. Girls pay more attention to spelling and grammar.

2. One powerful man with a blog can make you or destroy you. (from the usual 100+ views/day, I ended up having 800+, which is no small potatoes where I come from).

3. Scandal is good for advertising. If you’re selling something, if you’re trying to promote a book (or a blog), nothing will get people talking about it faster than a good scandal (if sex is involved, even better!).

4. If your site/blog gets some advertising, then you’re set. I haven’t updated the darn thing in two days and visitors come pouring in, at the advice of people they can trust.

5. The (romanian?) blogosphere is an organism. It reacts to every single change in the society herein.

As my purpose has been achieved, what is there left to do? What peak is left to triumph over? What giant awaits to be slain? Oh, the pity I feel for childish blog authors posting pictures of their cats and talking about how much their lives suck. Is this it? Are there no more things to talk about and dissect?

I check my blog stats for the last time today (910 views) and hope that tomorrow will bring me wisdom and courage to pursue my (other) goals. Bloggers everywhere, beware!