John Hawkins at Right Wing News has posted a piece proclaiming that if you’re not a big important blogger like him and are just a smaller, newer, blogger like me, then you should just give up, hang your head in shame and go away.
Hawkins can shove it, because I am not going anywhere and neither are most of my colleagues, big & small, in the right blogosphere, no matter how much he and other elitist snobs wish that we would. It appears the whole point of his post was to demoralize the competition that is not as big and important as he thinks he is, which if you ask me, smells like an ulterior motive. . . .
You can read the whole thing. Personally, I understand that Hawkins was trying to be helpful. The title of his post was intended to call attention to real problems, and what he was really saying was, Hey, people, it’s a competitive environment out there — gotta up your game!
Which is inarguably true. I had a conversation with Jimmie Bise a couple weeks ago where we briefly kicked around the new Google+ thing: Is this a tool I should be using? How does it differ from Facebook and Twitter?
A couple of years ago, Reddit was supposed to be the Big Thing for boosting blog traffic, but I never got into it. There are only so many online tools I can use at any one time — like the trash-crowded hard drive of my 4-year-old laptop, my mind has finite space available for keeping track of passwords and logins — and if my failure to adopt Reddit has cost me any traffic, I haven’t noticed.
So now . . . Google+ is here, and I’m asking myself: Is this going to be as cool and essential as Twitter? Or is this going to be a minor distraction like Reddit? I dunno. But the point is, I’ve got to think about stuff like that, because keeping up with new tools is part of the job description.
You gotta up your game — if that’s what Hawkins is trying to say, he’s right, even if the way he said it made Zilla and a lot of other bloggers angry.
BTW, considering the generous response from my tip-jar hitters — both to me and to Da Tech Guy — I decided to hit Zilla’s tip jar.