Once again, I failed to make it into Time‘s annual list of the best blogs. It’s beginning to dawn on me that my scattershot approach to blogging isn’t helping me cultivate my on-line brand identity (and I just threw up a little in my mouth when I realized I wrote “on-line brand identity”). But all my favorite topics–politics, pop culture, tech, fishnets–already have popular and high-profile blogs devoted to them. I need to come up with some kind of stunt blogging event, like the girl who followed to the letter the edicts of Seventeen magazine for a month. Maybe I could chronicle my efforts to read every Star Trek tie-in novel ever written or to sample the dishes of every local restaurant in puréed form. There must be some way I can completely waste my time while still getting the attention I so desperately crave.
I do think you need to actually get out and do something in order for your blog to be noticed in the way the one you linked to has been. Certainly, even though that girl is very smart and a good writer, if she just wrote about how vapid Seventeen is, no one would have noticed. She’s just a crank. So she got a hook, and it worked. No matter how good a writer you are, just observing things at a distance just isn’t compelling to the people who keep track of these sorts of things.
So I suggest that you and I go across the country doing something like going to bondage clubs, requesting the same things and seeing how the workers there treat us or react to us differently based on our differing physical and psychological abilities/disabilities, and blog about it. I’m sure that would get some attention.