4 posts tagged “blogging”

Blogger

We were sitting in a Moroccan restaurant, Lady Resourceful and I, making the usual hilarious comments about how the starters are really moreish, and then I found myself talking non-stop for perhaps five or eight or twenty-six minutes while she necked all the wine.  Suddenly she yawned cavernously and I stopped talking and she frowned and said, 'What?'  I demanded an explanation for the yawn. 

She told me that I have a really soothing voice, and that my monologue had made her sleepy.

  'I was talking about the rise in gun crime!' I said.  'Damn it, I am not soothing.'

  'I'm sure the content of your speech was thrilling,' she said, indicating that she had listened to none of it, not even my ideas involving giant magnets, 'but you have to admit that you have a calm tone.  You remind me of...'

  'Brando?'

She said Cliff Richard, and when we got home I went straight to the attic to leave interesting comments on strangers' blogs.  In the blogosphere no-one can hear you... well, they can't hear you.  Specifically, they can't hear that you sound like Cliff Richard.  I wrote an entry for my other blog, the good blog, and then I replied to someone's comment, and then Lady R came upstairs just as I was laughing at something I'd written.  She told me that it was 1 am and she was going to bed and that I was a reprehensible techno-adulterer.

The next day my mother phoned me and we talked for a while and she steered me away from the topic of gun crime and giant magnets by asking how things were going in real life.  'Oh,' I said, 'fine.'

  'Anything interesting happening?'

  'You know, just things.'

  'Things, eh?' she said.  'When did you become such a raconteur?'

  'Look, I've written all about it on my blog,' I sighed.  'Did I ever give you the URL?'

My mother would not know a URL if it parachuted onto her from a helicopter.  She said, 'Are you in some kind of cult?'

At work someone pointed out that while blogging may be The Future Of Business, the Present of Business might be a less stressful affair if I did less blogging and more data entry.  Just until the new website went live, of course, after which I could resume my crusade for web presence... 

I was going to object that blogging on company time is NOT just some fun personal indulgence during which I get to voice my thoughts without sounding like Sir Cliff, damn it!  But then I started wondering if that's exactly what it is.  Because now I think about it, there's always something more - well, more useful that I could be doing with my time.  Something more useful and less fun.

So I stayed away for a few days, until my boss told me to get back and write a post or she'd fire me.

Devil woman.

Does everyone go through this phase where blogging seems a bit wrong?  Seems a bit like a vampire that feeds on your real life and leaves it bloodless?  Has anyone else found themselves in the bloghouse during their blogging career? 

Are you allowed to say that it all seems a little illicit at times?

That's all for now.  I got me some real work to do. 

The audacity of hope

If everyone waited until the end of their careers to share their wisdom and reflections, we wouldn’t have any of Katie Price’s autobiographies.  Not one!  I may be a blog rookie (blookie), but I am a (former) professional, now an admin monkey – albeit a monkey with Kong-sized dreams! - who blogs on the company’s time, so I feel every bit as as qualified as Jordan to dish out unsolicited opinions.  With 22 posts under my belt, and three more posts on another blog that enjoys readership in quadruple figures (4 is sort of a quadruple figure), I’ve had plenty of time to make mistakes – and learn from them!  Won’t you join me as we slink through my top 1001 blogging tips?  Along the way, you might learn something you didn’t know about the US presidential contenders!

Fired

We were geeks, to be sure.  We were the kind of kids who enjoyed chess and building centrifuges and, in my case, writing faux-Poe gothic fiction.  But one of our gang (if four teenaged wimps can be so called) achieved the impossible: he won himself popularity with the toughest boys at school.

Wayne couldn’t laugh out loud at his dad’s nonsense, or he’d have been killed.  So he started to impersonate him at school.  At first he only did it around his friends.  But one day, during P.E., a tough kid complained that his boots were too big and Wayne blurted out in an army voice, ‘Big boots – I like that in a man.’  Now, the general rule is that impersonations aren’t funny if you don’t know the person being impersonated, but the tough kid and all his friends started laughing.  They had tough dads too, and were glad of any opportunity to laugh at them. 

Mocking macho fathers became standard practice during football.  ‘You’ve got a tight young butt and shoes to die for – I like that in a man.’ 

One day, Wayne accidentally did an impression of his dad in front of his dad.  His brother was showing their dad how big his arms were getting from doing press-ups, and Wayne said in his dad’s voice, ‘Good arms, Francis - but remember, a man only ever looks as good as his hair.’

Luckily, his dad didn’t realise that Wayne was taking the mickey.  That man could have told you how to survive in the wilderness by eating bats, but he couldn't recognise satire if it leapt out of a bush and stole his cufflinks.

Fast forward: I'm watching some comedy spoof of The Apprentice on television - you know, Sir Alan Sugar pits hotshots against each other in a competition to win an early coronary in his employ - and I'm finding it particularly funny, because everyone in the spoof sounds exactly like Wayne's funny impressions.  The self-seriousness, the sales-speak, the OTT aggression.  'See you in the fast lane!' they threaten each other ambiguously.  'Listen Rogers, it's par nine for the bogey and the bases are loaded.  It's time to pull your finger out your arse and smell the coffee.'  Wonderful!

Alan Sugar appears.  I realise it isn't a spoof.  These are real business people.

I'd have guessed that this type of business person would be extinct by now, and I'd have been wrong.  But I'll bet that they soon will be extinct, and I think I'll be right.

Here's just one reason: the rise of the company blog.  It is both driving and heralding a change in corporate culture.  Having a company blog doesn't just affect the way potential customers see you; it affects the way a company sees itself.  The majority of company blogs are as alluring as a back-alley flasher, but more and more really good ones are appearing, and they all have one thing in common: an absence of the kind of pelvis-thrusting bespoke-suited corporate barking you see on The Apprentice.  The more a company appreciates a need for a blog - and companies are starting to see blogging as very important indeed - the more it appreciates having employees who sound human.  And the more it comes to view as ridiculous those people who can't undo the top button on their conversational shirts. 

Are you ready for the irresistible rise of the recognisably human employee?

Grammar

Haven't written a post for 3 days know, and have sort of been pudding it off.  Your thinking: he's just lazy!  But your wrong.  The truth, I have discovered, is that I am just too much of a perfectionist - and it is slowing me down.