I Only Comment When It Benefits Me
Whew! It has been a rough couple of days. I haven’t even watched television in, oh, THREE DAYS! How is that possible? The flu has struck our house and I was suffering like you would not believe! Yesterday I didn’t even get off the couch. The house was a wreck, but that’s life. I needed a really long nap. I’m feeling much better today, though. Thanks.
I have to turn my attention to BloggingZoom. Before Ye Ole Flubug hit, I became a little addicted. Yes, I know I was a little put off by all the money-making blogs (honestly, who doesn’t want to make money?), but then people started submitting articles that were more interesting and pretty soon I was sucked in. I just started following links, reading stories, getting tons of useful information, and before you know it Saturday was gone. Considering that a lot of blogs that I’ve been visiting lately seem to be sans blogroll, this is a really good way to find new blogs to fall in love with. Of course, there’s also some fodder for "What are they thinking?" file. Gotta say, the best posts to blog about are the ones that make you squint your eyes and cuss at the monitor. Ya know?
While I was stumblin’ around (or zooming? Hmm) I fell upon a blog post I found mildly interesting. In this post there was some talk about commenting on other blogs. I thought maybe this was going to be another rant about commenters leaving "PlayVegasAllNight.com" as their name or something. I love posts like that. Every time I see one I think "Kindred spirit!" I was a little disappointed.
Turns out that this particular blogger is one of the "blog snobs" that I try to avoid. By that, I don’t mean that she is necessarily a bad person. But she is very calculating about where she’s going to comment, who should comment on her post, where she’s going to link, etc- all that mattered was SERPs in the end. So, community and meeting other people were almost (but not quite) unimportant in the grand scheme of things. The blogger says that she will only comment on blogs with that are part of the Do Follow movement and then only if she can get in as one of the first commenters and a couple of very strategic reasons. That’s fine, I suppose. I can get that some people are only in this for the money. It’s sad, but I get it. So, I get to the bottom of the post, to the comments, and what do I see? Nofollowed comments!
A little explanation. I have Search Status enabled on my toolbar. It’s a Firefox plugin that prompts the browser to highlight all nofollows found on the page. I can tell right away if someone is part of the Do Follow community or blowing smoke. It’s got a couple other features, but I’ve jumped around enough.
I don’t care that the comments were nofollowed. My thing was that this person made such a big deal about commenting only on blogs with Do Follow- so she can get backlinks - but she’s not doing the same thing for her commenters.
Not only that, but I followed her from a post where she commented about another blog (which was mentioned in that particular post) but hadn’t commented on the blog she was discussing. Why? That blog’s comments were nofollowed. Huh? You honestly have a compliment for a blogger because he’s doing something you admire, but you won’t comment on his blog because…?
I just don’t get. I do not get it. When did the blogosphere become such a cold, ugly place?
*sigh*
Well, luckily my PR stinks like butt, so I don’t expect this particular person to ever grace my low-down, no good blog. That’s a good thing.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Sphere: Related ContentZooming the Wannabes
Have you seen Blogging Zoom? It’s a site similar to Digg or Reggit, but it’s specifically set up for bloggers to promote, among other things, thier own content. It just started a couple of weeks ago, but it’s picking up steam.
I submitted one of my own posts to Blogging Zoom and really didn’t get anywhere with it. It’s all about the title and description. If either are poorly done then too bad, so sad you’re not going to get a lot of traffic. Come to think about it, I’m not sure you’re going to get a whole lot of traffic right now anyway, but that’s not my point.
I really like the site. I like the design and I like a lot of the listings. I’ve been doing a lot of stumbling around the web (my new term for websurfing, by the way, because I really, really like to use my StumbeUpon toolbar) and I’ve found some awesome things to read on Zoom. It’s a huge timewaster for me.
Stumbling then got me thinking that I would like a more personal theme. What if I go ahead and submit something worthwhile to Blogging Zoom, it gets popular, and people can’t get into my theme? I’m very weird about that. So, I spent two whole days looking for the perfect theme I could tweak. I found a really nice one then put it up and BOOM! the coding was wrong. A key background image wasn’t showing up. So, I went through the code, recoded, tried to figure out just what was going wrong. Then I figured it out, but by then I was incredibly bored with the theme, decided the code was just too messy, and threw it out. WTF? I was completely obsessed with this theme and all of the sudden I was done. Anyway, I decided there have to better coded themes that do what I need to be done and aren’t as messy (re: easier to tweak). So I found a few and then realized how much time I’d spent just trying to change something for someone that may or may not pop in occasionally. Allrighty then.
Hopefully I won’t get the theme itch again. Because I really can’t afford to be sitting worrying about these things right now. I would love to create my own theme, but the way my mind works…. Um, ain’t happenin’.
I’ll go stumble around Blogging Zoom again, try to avoid that theme thing, and wish for once there weren’t so many SEO "MAKE MONEY BLOGGING" blogs clogging up everything. If there’s one thing that bugs the hell out of me right now is the amount of blogs that have "make money" in their title. They see a couple of big name bloggers make it work and BAM! they jump on the bandwagon. *YAWN* I’m getting to the point that I just skip over those blogs and their fancy titles and whatever. Honestly, if I want to learn how to make money blogging, seo, etc etc, I’m going to be reading the same blogs these folks are reading. That niche is overcrowded. Too many people jumping on the bandwagon. You know how you eat so many chocolate-covered [insert food here] and pretty soon you can’t stand the sight of chocolate because it makes you nauseous? Yeah, that’s how I’m feeling about making money blogging. No lie.
Luckily, those titles are easy to see and there are a lot more fun things to see on Blogging Zoom. It’s just like eating trail mix. There’s always something in there you don’t like, so you’ve got to pick around to make sure you don’t accidentally get pieces of that thing. There’s always the danger of being suckered, though. Gotta watch out for that. Still, there is no way I’m going to click on one more blog about how to monetize your stuff. The big guys have it covered and I’m wondering if there’s even a place for women at the table. At least not that particular table (the one where you talk all about making money online and how you can achieve greatness) no one takes women seriously in that niche, I think. At least not enough women to make a difference.
Maybe it’s just that women can see nonsense like that and avoid it. 
Yeah, that’s it. Women are too good to be suckered in. Well, most women. There are still one or two that think they can compete in that particular niche. Good luck, ladies. Ha! Please, please do me a favor and don’t clog up the Zoom with your stuff though. Everyone else has already written about [fill in the blank] a thousand times, saying the exact same thing you’re saying. Write about something else. Like t.v.
Popularity: 5% [?]
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