Back to a long non-posting rut as I sometimes have here on T&T…Its hard to stay in the groove of blogging every day, especially when you are running multiple blogs.  I don’t even have a whole lot of time for this post seeing as its 4 minutes past midnight, and I need to head to bed as I’m leaving for Hollywood in the morning.

My friend Laura has been in town from Australia for the past 2 weeks, and we have been super busy doing just about everything there is to do in SoCal.  I took this week off work, and we have headed to Havasu, Sea World, Padres Game, Downtown, The Zoo, and tomorrow -Hollywood / LA.  Its been awesome, as I haven’t even done any of the tourist stuff and I have lived in SD for over 4 years now.  My parents came down on monday, and they have been hanging out doing stuff with us too, so Its been a super busy, hectic, and totally awesome week!

I will have tons of pictures and updates about her entire trip in an upcoming post, not to mention all the insanely cool stuff I have in store for WBSD, along with some new web design jobs I have coming up, Awesome plans for a river trip with Dani for the 4th, and a million other things that make up the way-too-busy but extremely awesome life of Ian.  Stay Tuned!

“Shit” might sound plural, like there are multiple things I hate about it…but I’m really writing this in regards to just one thing I really really really hate about blogging.  Well, actually multiple now because I just thought of another.

Blogging makes me think of some trendy nerd with those little thin rectangle glasses on, an ipod stuck in his ears blaring some emo shit, sitting in a coffee shop furiously typing away on his new macbook air.  This is the farthest thing from me that there is.  And I blog all the time.  although they are always writing about some new web technology, or cutting edge new programming language…I just can’t stay up to date anymore, so this basically just my online journal.  I’m kind of trying to unwire my life in a way, since I’m on a computer all day at work, I kind of like to unplug after and do some real life shit (like my 3 days at the river this weekend - will post on that later).

Anyway, back to what really pissed me off.

Why is every blog post a “10 Reasons Why Every Blog has posts about 5 Reasons to Not do Something “.

It seems like every blogger writes some list of some sort.  I’m not saying that I am not guilty of it as well, I’m sure you can dig up some list post I have done around T&T, but I resolve to never do it again!  Seriously, why does every blog post have to be a list?  Are people really reading blogs just because they can easily digest information in bullet point format?  I don’t know, its just so annoying.

This is the post that set me off about this:

http://www.siteguide.us/2007/07/05/3-reasons-why-comment-relish-is-not-good-for-your-blog/

Instead of just casually discussing why he preferred to not use this wordpress plugin on his blog, he had to put it in some stupid numbered list.  WHY?  A “discussion with a friend” provided him with all of the reasons he listed on this post.

“On the contrary, I feel disgusted because the blog owner has treated me like a bot and not a human.”

This is just ridiculous.  In the world of blogging, anyone with good content is going to have some decent traffic.  If you send out a note to commentors on your blog, They aren’t going to be disgusted…maybe if your message just says - thanks for the comment, now subscribe already!  However, I use that plugin all the time for saying thanks, and pointing the commenter in a couple of directions - a link to my forum, a message about what makes my blog so interesting, a link to the contact form on my site so they can ask me a question.  All relative, valuable, worthwhile information.  So, I question whether this guy even uses the plugin correctly, or is just a cheap way to try and push people to add him to their feed reader?

I don’t know, and maybe I’m off topic, but thats just some blogging shit that really annoys me.

One of the books I have been intending to read is The Four Hour Work Week. I have heard good things about it, and truthfully, I am really just interested in cutting a day out of my work schedule. I hate getting stuck in the grind of working 9 hours every day only to get home, take care of a couple things before passing out and getting back up the next morning to do it all over again. Then I try to pack as much fun as I possibly can into the two days I have off for my weekend, before its back to doing it all over again. The only positive is that weeks tend to fly by when you are in such a repetitive grind, but god damn does it start to wear on you. Thats why when a buddy of mine sent me this link about Outsourcing Your Life in an attempt to achieve a condensed work week, I began to question if this could really be done. Intriguing:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/outsourcing-life/

I borrowed that image from his site, but look at all the cool stuff he has time to do in that extra day!  Turn into a woman and get a massage, turn back into a dude and go skiing down mount everest, and enjoy an African sunset in the middle of the sahara desert.  I WANT THAT LIFE!  Well, maybe not the woman/massage part.  Well, I like women, and massages, but I don’t want to be one.  Anyway…

With such cheap outsourcing in India (I think he paid $4-10 per hour for outsourced assistants), why not do this to delegate the menial tasks that you are assigned with day to day? Granted, their English is not flawless, and you pretty much get what you pay for, but if these people can take care of your searching and reporting research for you, hey why not? This sparked an idea for me - why not start a blog that is written, inadvertently, by outsourced Indian personal assistants. Every day I could pass off a research topic to them to have formatted for a blog post ready for the next day. Essentially it could be my blog, containing topics I would love to write about but don’t have the time, and the content is created from their perspective. This could be a pretty interesting experiment in outsourced Blogging. “Outblogging“? no? “BlogSourcing“? Not web 2.0 enough? hmm… I’ll have to think this one over. What do you think?

On another note. I’m burnt out. I need to drink a bottle of wine tonight. SeeYuh!