Reading Blogs != End to Boredom

If you’re not a programmer, the != thing means “not equal to”. In other words, the title of this post could be roughly translated thusly:

If you’re bored, reading blogs is not the way to cure that boredom.

You might be wondering what brought me to that conclusion. However, you needn’t worry: I wouldn’t have bothered typing up this post, if I didn’t have an answer ready for you. And the answer is this: I had a few minutes to kill at work, and nothing to do with those few minutes. So I opened up my blog—the very blog you’re reading right now!—and clicked the Next Blog link at the top, which simply brings you to another random Blogger blog. I would start reading it, get bored, and click its Next Blog link, to find another one. (Warning: If you’re going to do this, be prepared for the fact that some of the blogs out in the blog wide web are adult in nature. As I found out the awkward way. I’m glad nobody was standing behind me.)

I went through about a dozen blogs, in about six minutes. (That’s an average of thirty seconds per blog.) I was able to go through them so quickly because they’re so boring. Just think of the bandwidth that I, and my fellow bloggers, are wasting! Think of the wasted hours! Days, even!

So many very smart people working at Google/Blogger, creating this great service, so that people could write intelligent things like… well, let me pull up a random one, and see what it has to say.

Whoops, that one was in Swedish.

Oh. This one’s not in English, either. (I can’t tell what language it is.) And neither is the third one. Ah, here we go! Blog #4:

I think my 2/3 finished lit essay isn't that good. I'm just listing stuff really. I took a nap at 8 pm, my mum got carried away with the tv and woke me up at 11.30. So now I'm struggling at 4 am and theres fake napfa later. Whatever happens, I luzz.

I have nothing much to say about the golden globes really. Helen Mirren is almost surely gonna hit oscar jackpot for The Queen. But the only one I really bothered to be happy about was Forest Whitaker's Golden Globe for Last King of Scotland. He's a highly underrated actor really. And go watch his acceptance speech on youtube, really nervous and humble.

There. Perfect example. Are you interested? I’m not.

And this is exactly the kind of crap that I write, here on my own blog! Well, my grammar is better, but still. I might not have written about the Golden Globes, but I do post movie reviews, and book reviews. Who am I to put up a movie review?!? What do I know about movies, that qualifies me to recommend a movie for you to watch?

But I digress. Let’s find another one:

Eight months is a long time to go without a job. It is two months longer than unemployment insurance. It is almost long enough to have a baby. And it is long enough to cause many nights filled with self-doubt, stress and visions of financial ruin.

I have not been without a job in over 20 years. I have been the Executive Director of non-profit organizations for the past 13 years. I have served on boards, been heavily involved in politics for the past 15 years and have a national network of friends. In short, I was a professional with a load of professional skills.

The nights and days of self-doubt and the accompanying self-loathing were spawned through unreturned phone calls, horrible interviews, really bad communications from hiring panels and a total lack of response from boatloads of resume submissions.

….

Rats. That one doesn’t prove my point. It’s not bad at all. I cut it off—it went on for a while from there—but it was interesting to read.

The next two blogs I went to were family blogs, so I don’t have anything to say about them. They’re not meant for anyone other than the family, so there would be no point judging them on how interesting they are—to their target audiences, they’re very interesting. And the next one was a “Raptors Insider” blog, which I can’t judge either. This is a blog with a purpose, unlike mine, so all it has to do is stay true to that purpose, and it serves its user base.

So I didn’t find enough blogs to prove my point. Figures; I went through so many boring ones, and then when I wanted boring ones, I couldn’t find enough examples. I even found—after I’d stopped looking for boring ones—a Christian blog that looked like it might be interesting, which I’ve bookmarked. So… not only did I not prove my point, I proved the opposite!

So I am now changing my position, on the subject: Many, many blogs on the internet—perhaps even most of them—are very boring, and pointless. But if you keep searching, you’ll find some good ones.

So um, yeah… good luck with that.