I don't do it for the money...

...but for the glory, for the joy of writing and for my dear four readers, that's why I write a blog. In this long but slightly interesting article in the Financial Times, the author discusses the vagaries of blogdom. Do people get rich? Is it really the new dominant media? Who cares? The reason why I like writing a blog is because it is thrilling to write and to know there is an anonymous audience out there, all four of them, unmediated by people like Nan Talese, with marketing mischief in mind. In the article, Choire Sicha dumps all over the blogosphere. It's easy for him to do it now that thanks to his stint as a blogger, he got hired at the New York Observer (that's mighty ungracious, if you ask me). I don't care if it's considered a blogosphere, a blogdom or a bloggage or a blogsmos. I have found some interesting bloggers that otherwise I would never know about. We've read each other's stuff. My world is a tad broader now. I have also found utter dreck, but that's to be expected. Excellence is a thing of the few, not of the many.
I love the fact that blogdom provides people who work in offices with a perfect cover to waste zillions of hours. They look seriously busy as they scan their computers with furrowed brows and their boss thinks they are such loyal, pathetic cogs in the wheel, and in fact they are wasting precious company time reading mostly inane shit. I'm all for that. (Not the inane shit, but the wasting of precious company time: it has a subversive je ne sais quoi to it). Plus, blogging is, for better or worse, truly democratic. Surfing around, I found mostly inocuous personal pages (most of them mindnumbingly boring, but some interesting and well written), one or two absolutely disgusting, truly shocking, violently offensive white-supremacist sites that nobody here is about to start WWIII about (and hurray for that), a lot of people who post one post that says "this is a test", and a lot of blogger porn spam sites. By the way, aren't you people sick of porn? Isn't there a threshold of exposure where all that human meat gets old and funky in the meatlocker of your minds? Anyway...
Everybody and their mother can start a blog, and they should if they see fit, but very few will have anything compelling and well written to say. My blog is a way for me to exercise my English writing skills, to have fun creating this virtual verbissener bitch on wheels (in reality I'm a sweetie, don't you know), and it is thrilling to look at the hit counter and see 3 more people logged in today. Now, with the thrill comes a certain responsibility. For me, it is to write correctly and engagingly and be true to my virtual self which is more like myself than my friends and neighbors would like to believe.
My two extremely smart sisters, the Medium and Small Enchiladas, once took me to task for making fun of Ariel Sharon's coma. Not that they love the guy, they just thought it was in very bad taste. I respect that, but what I like about blogging is that I'm my own editor and, believe it or not, I do restrain myself from sounding like a hysterical shrew or a foul-mouthed troglodyte. I know 3 of my 4 readers were taken aback by my comment about hating pets and the people who own them, and I got a couple of requisite slaps in the wrist for that. But it is refreshing not to be politically correct, and to vent to my heart's content. In fact, that's what my readers like, according to the latest Gallup poll.
As for the writing correctly, that's the only thing that should be a criterion for blogging. Man, be a freaking neonazi bastard or a stupid suburban housewife or a Christian cheerleader if you must be, but write correctly. People who can't spell drive me insane. Not to toot my own horn, but English isn't even my native language. If you are going to write, LEARN HOW TO SPELL, FOR FUCK'S SAKE.
I am told by blogosphere connoisseurs (had to look up the spelling for this one) that lists are very popular in the internet. In fact, I was told celebrity boobies and lists of favorites are all the rage. And because, deep inside and despite what you've read so far, my real wish is to be humongously popular, and get a literary agent to offer me a number with many zeroes to the right and quit blogging so I can be a Mega Enchilada Cosmic Superstar, you are going to have to do without the boobies, but I promise to get you some lists.