One thing you’ll notice the more time you spend on the blogosphere is the immense traffic-value of The Blank Statement. Folks online don’t have time for nuance - you better either want it or not! Or as one of my acting teachers used to say when trying to figure out your relationship to a character or object: ‘You either want to kill it or f*ck it.’

Blanket Statements, also known as Condemnations, can be good for driving traffic, polarizing clients and turning off friends and family. So I present my:

Top Ten Techniques for Writing Blanket Statements to Drive Blog Traffic

1) Choose something popular. Making fun of unpopular things is no way to drive traffic. Be sure you choose something worthy of ridicule. Evidence: a post on my personal blog about Prussian Blue, a pair of nazi-tartlet pop stars gets tons of hits.

2) Choose something already online. Since you want to drive buzz and traffic - choose ideas and things that are already available online. No sense picking on something that isn’t in digital format - other people won’t be able to investigate it and share your ridicule.

3) Choose something around sex, religion or politics. Nothing gets people more polarized than the Sacred Three. Why do you think abortion and gay rights are constantly conentious (at least here in the US of A)?

4) Choose someone that has a blog. The egos of writers are famed for long protracted battles and conflicts. But where the literati had to wait for each edition of their newspaper, with a blog you can take someone down in real time.

5) Don’t pull a Godwin. I did this last week. Godwin means you immediately compare something to the Nazis. Supposedly, in internet-land, that means you have lost the argument. In the real world it means you get to do a pre-emptive invasion.

6) It’s all or nothing. Again love it - hate it. There’s no middle ground anymore. Moderates have to pick sides. If they don’t their cowards or idiots.

7) Choose something iconic. Everyone likes to see a take down of an icon or brand. Make spam from that sacred cow. (…pig?)

8) What About the Children. One of my favorite memes is that every new widget or shmoo is out to hurt the world’s children and feast on their naivete. Some think the blogosphere is merely Pennywise the Clown in distributed, peer-to-peer format.

9) Don’t investigate. Before slandering something or someone - be sure that you don’t read anything about it or take time to thoughtfully consider the various facets of the problem. No one is going to read all of your Blanket Statement anyway so you don’t want to invest anymore time than you have to.

10) Make lists. Be a Letterman. Make your list easy to scan and easy for people to not read all of and make instant sharp value judgements that feed the fire.

BONUS: Passive Aggressiveness. Don’t forget the power in the victim/aggressor stance. After you lash out be sure to act like you had no idea people would take your ideas so seriously. Get your feelings hurt after you’ve burned somebody on the pyre. Catholics don’t have to worry about this skill since it is innate.

So I’ll see everybody in the blanketosphere… or is that condemnosphere… persecutosphere?

Bubblegeneration piles on with the MySpace?! panic with some analysis - particularly on why VCers (and the developers) tend to not grasp the underlying trends:

Why the VC disconnect? My answer: investing in enterprise software and semiconductors is distinctly not like investing in media and other culture industries. In fact, I would argue that VCs are in a competence trap - it’s exactly those things that made them successful at investing in software and chips that make them very unsuccessful at investing in culture.

Mentioned is Makeup Alley - a site just on cosmetics. Here’s why it would have been a good property to buy:

What it does have is a very, very, very deep understanding of what consumers in it’s vertical value, how to connect them into a coherent community, how to manage and regulate this community, and how to translate those connections into deep and shallow value creation.

Jeremy knows how to write a post! He does a great version of the ‘It’s coming right for us!’ panic post with a warning about social networking site MySpace. He contends that since MySpace has more posts than blogging and will surpass the size of the blogosphere that it is something to be scared of.

True, MySpace is a great example of an extensive network of folks that has grown exponentially over the past few years.

I just can’t get past the butt-ugly templates.

Good God they are NASTY and UGLEE. Like Appalachian inbred ugly. Like ‘Did you fall down on your face when you were three?’ ugly. Yick. Like early GeoCities ugly.

I got a MySpace account in an effort to find some old chums from high school but I’ve been very nonplussed about the whole thing. For me, it is just one more damned thing to login to and check messages for. For me, the whole thing is one big annoyance.

Jeremy continues:

What is the impact on humanity if MySpace becomes intrinsically tied to the identity of an entire generation? Yeah, MySpace scares me.

He does make a great contention that MySpace might have it’s own culture and might exert that cultural pressure into other groups. But is it a unified group or just a bunch of horny voyeurs? Couldn’t the vast homosexual agenda buried in the dating profiles of Gay.com be just as threatening (hardly). I’m not knocking voyeurism: amateur porn is what powered AOL, Flickr and the net in general. God knows LinkedIn ain’t got any eye candy.

When we eventually have 100M people (primarily 10-25) on MySpace, how does their culture affect other ‘cultures’ outside of MySpace? When there are that many people, will MySpace’ers begin being elite?

How can something open to everyone and freely joinable and friend-able become elite? I really doubt the upper-class or the Carlyle Group have anything to worry about.

I don’t think MySpace is a threat to anything. His post cracks me up because it is like he’s this old fogie stomping out with his walker screaming You kids git off mah frunt porch!

Jason Kottke asked folks to chip in and fund his blogging for a year - he raised nearly $40k. He’s ended the experiment and reports out:

I haven’t grown traffic enough or developed a sufficient cult of personality to make the subscription model a sustainable one for kottke.org…those things just aren’t interesting to me…My (unstated) intention from the beginning was to approach the site as a startup, but along the way life intervened (in a good way) and I couldn’t focus on it as much as I wanted to. The site became a normal job, a 9-to-5 affair, which meant that I could keep up with it, but growth was hard to come by.

Reaction from Metafilter:

I donated and I regret it. Maybe the error was on my part in assuming that Jason was going to do something different when his site became his job. Nope. The fucker took our money and headed to Europe, Asia, and other places, and did absolutely nothing different on his site.

or

I count it as $30 well spent. Thanks, Jason.

I am so guilty of this. I don’t use the active voice when I blog. I don’t even know if I can recognize it. Lori at Blogcritics has a tutorial:

Use the active voice. Instead of saying, “The running back was tackled by the linebacker,” say, “The linebacker tackled the running back.” The passive voice moves the actor (subject) away from the action (verb) and makes it seem like the whole world sits around waiting for something to happen.

Other tips include getting feedback, sleeping on your writing, use simple/strong verbs, and put the important part first!

Full article: One Simple Rule for Improving Your Writing

The Financial Times has a giddy little epitaph for blogging:

We must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold - a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave “new economy” a few years ago?

More snippets:

The inherent problem with blogging is that your brand resides in individuals. If they are fabulous writers, someone is likely to lure them away to a better salary and the opportunity for more meaningful work; if the writer tires and burns out, the brand may go down in flames with them.

Ana Marie Cox (formerly of Wonkette) describes an oft-missed detail:

When people talk about the liberation of the armchair pajamas media, they tend to turn a blind eye to the fact that the voices with the loudest volume in the blogosphere definitely belong to people who have experience writing. They don’t have to be experienced journalists necessarily, but they write - part of their professional life is to communicate clearly in written words.

and some final hand-wringing:

And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence.

Full article: Time for the last post.

(transcript on the way)

Subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Podnova, or Odeo. Or join the newsletter.

As part of the outreach for Blogwild! A Guide for Small Business Blogging, I’m hosting a free series of expert calls with some of the top blogging brainiacs out there.

Our fourth call was with Rich Brooks from flyte new media. Rich Brooks is President of Web design and Internet marketing firm flyte new media and author of The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make.

Our call focused on roadblocks and obstacles to online marketing success - especially applying to blogs.

Robert Scoble’s written a post with some tips on post composition:

1) Get your pic added to your Technorati blog claim
2) Write posts that can be tagged with the most popular tags being used right now
3) Shake up your templates to look different.
4) Use graphics.
5) Get some personality. Sometimer I think my redesign for this blog muted my personal flavor a bit.
6) Use lots and lots of tags.
7) Email a few others about a blog post you’ve written.

Full article: Tips for Joining the A-List