Stirring the Pot

That Shakespeare thing?  "Me thinks the lady doth protest too much."

Wow.  Let's all get in a big circle, bunch up our skivvies, and then after our skivvies are in a big enough bunch, hold hands and form a gigantic example of a stereotype.

I am a grandmother.  I used to be a mom.  Well, actually, I am still a mom.  I am also still a daughter.  So  if I was in the mood to jump on bandwagons, I would be pretty busy, and knowing me, I would end up with lots of bruises.

The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about how mommy blogging is such a biggie nowadays, and how much money companies are spending to appeal to this group as they  see them as cash cows, plainly and simply.   I didn't think the article was terribly biased as WSJ articles can be.  I felt it was a commentary on a phenomenon. Lots and lots of people got pissed about it.

I don't care if someone says I blog for this and that altruistic reason, and I know this is gonna lose me a passel of followers, but when you go to read about someone's latest cute caprice with their darling family and it is a repost of a three year old article but still has all the latest ads and product updates, you gotta wonder.

I used to have ad sense ads on my blog, and they are missing out on a good deal here.  I have asked  what is  the deal since the spaces show up but the actual ads don't.  (I referred to the canary story previously.) So maybe I am just trying to use my own blog as a cash cow.  But it isn't.  It hasn't had an ad for years, and I am not pelting Google with complaints cuz the ads are not there.  I blog mostly to vent, and I make that very clear from the get go.

I don't care how much you shout about how you are just trying to give other mommies a heads up with some of their issues.  Some of them are very serious about that and do a service, but many of the mommy blogs are ADS.  Like the one's that crop up on yahoo that tell you they are going to give you the straight dope in thirty seconds and then another long blah'blah'blah starts after the thirty seconds.  Or that darling video about the mom and dad rapping.  It was a little too well produced you all noticed.  And then you found out, if you clicked and watched the video you had some woman blabbing in your mail box about her marketing company every day.  Misleading.  Don't like it.  Do you?

STATE YOUR BUSINESS.  I feel like a monkey when I respond to some story some one wrote in their blog only to realize later that the story was just a back drop to get you interested in these swell pots and pans. If you want to sell stuff, fine.  Lots of people want to buy stuff.  I would LOVE to sell stuff.  But I don't think shoving the product down someone's throat or mixing the Milk of Magnesia in with the Nestle's Quik is the way to do it.  But maybe that is just me.  I have taken up a lot of space here over the past year or so talking about the buy me, buy me phenomenon that is becoming so wide spread.  Okay.  I am just jealous.  Happy?  Does my saying that make you a little less angry about the WSJ article?

I think someone just poked you in that tender spot you have been trying to pretend wasn't there.

I want to build a huge literary metaphor about the panhandlers on Clark street wearing clean clothes and make up, and the shabby guy on the street corner in Wheeling with the okay but kind of old winter coat holding the sign "will work for food".  But I guess that would be putting too fine a point on it.  It is really just another internet meme, and when one leaves, another one pops up.


Photo Attribution:  restoringthoughts.blogspot.com 

Mommy Blogging

I am not a mommy blogger.  I do talk about my grandchildren a lot and feel it is necessary to share their amazing beauty with this deprived world. (That is an "I" not a typo) And a few years back when nine people lived here and I was in a fog, I did write about my children some times.  But now I write about me and politics and idiocy and stuff. Which may be the same thing mommy bloggers write about.

Well, maybe I got this attitude from starting out my internet communication mania pre-twitter by using Goodreads and Amazon forums.  On both of those it is clearly stated that it is bad form to promote yourself or spam, that is, hide a sneaky link to something within the boundaries of your blog so people do not know they are reading an ad. They have specific self-promotion forums where you can go nuts if you want.

That has gone out the window.  There is Google Ad Sense, and I used to have ads on my blog.  Once I wrote about my canaries and an ad for birdcages appeared in the margin.  I thought that was terribly clever and technologically advanced.  I even had a balance of $1.72 in my Ad Sense account which I never collected because they don't cut you a check unless it is a certain amount.  I don't have ads anymore.  I have asked them why because the spaces are there.  My readership is much higher now so maybe I would earn more than $1.72 a year, but they keep telling me my blog sign-in is not my Ad Sense sign-in and they don't answer questions; they just send you to their circuitous forums and I never get the right answer.  Their loss.  They could be raking in a bundle off my back.

Anyway, I noticed lately this "Buy my book"  "Like me on facebook"  "visit my blog", etc.  EVERYWHERE.  Everyone still says you will lose twitter followers if you just keep linking to your book.  If someone reads my blog, they see the links to my book and can click or sample or whatever. (Damn, I wish they would BUY.  I'd be shitting in tall clover.) And "agents" will not ALLOW their clients to write on twitter or anywhere about their books.  So it is a subtle game.  To draw attention and not be spammy.  But now I have signed up to several blogs that have given me lots of hits, and some of them are interesting and amusing.  But many of them are purely ad based.  They try to relate it to their family, but it is buy this or that. And one that is usually about her family suddenly drops one that is purely an ad.  I am new to this, so maybe everyone else knows that is the purpose.  I am just trying to figure out how to get their links off of my facebook because they breed like bunnies.

I know that I will lose a passel of hits when they read this and take me off their linkys.  They probably already know I don't get it because I have been commenting  on their blogs about the content instead of the products they are pushing.

I hope everyone is not laughing up their sleeve at me, that that is the real purpose of Blogger and Wordpress and I have been totally disillusioned that it was to bring my literary bon mots to the attention of the world for their enjoyment and intellectual betterment.

And I hate that fucking Raffle Copter.

Photo attribution:  www.bloggerstand.com 

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