JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

I keep up with a lot of blogs, by any measure. My Google Reader subscriptions hover between 750 and 950 blogs I follow. With so many blogs in my feed, and my propensity to add any blog that looks interesting, I can afford, and sometimes have, to be ruthless in deciding what stays and what goes.

I have been giving my RSS feeds a good pruning recently, and noticed some trends in those whom I was ejecting from the roster. It seems that there are quite a few things I was previously willing to tolerate in blogs that I now will not put up with. It makes sense that with so much to read, and potentially so much more out there, that the wheat will be seperated from the chaff.

So, as a special tribute to the shuttering of Thursday Thirteen, I give you 13 types of people whom I am no longer interested in reading the blogs of or ever hearing from again:

1. People who continue to think of politics as a one-dimensional space and can therefore easily categorize themselves and others as; left/right, conservative/liberal, or are otherwise trapped by a narrative that no longer approximates reality.
2. People who have blogs for the sole purpose of selling things. You assholes have gotten the rest of us lumped in with infomercials and telemarketing.
3. People who have blogs for the sole purpose of selling how to sell things with blogs. You assholes created the previously mentioned assholes.
4. Anyone impressed with, or a fan of, the “freakonomics” strain of commodification thinking. It is simply arm-chair, superficial, first-thought-that-comes-into-your-mind social science.
5. People intrigued by celebrity gossip and those who feed them. Go outside and get a life of your own and the exploits of the Beckams or Brittany will stop looming quite so large in your imagination.
6. Anyone who has ever used the words “passionate”, “community” or “champion(ed)” in a marketing context, even once. No, I’m not kidding. You can all rot in hell.
7. Anyone who has anything to do with NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), which is neither connected to neuroscience nor linguistics, but seems to be quite the programme…
8. Anyone whose blog consists entirely, or even mostly, of rehashed posts from Techmeme, TechCrunch, Digg, YouTube and/or Slashdot.
9. People who cannot figure out how to use their blog software well enough to keep raw html out of their RSS feeds. I mean really, do you not look at your own feed? Do you know what a feed is?
10. People who cannot figure out how to use their blog software well enough to not republish dozens of items in their RSS feed every time they write a post.
11. People who do not publish full feeds. I read a LOT of RSS feeds, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to get out of my comfy RSS reader and click around your shitty blogger/livejournal site to read your article. If it’s important enough for me to read, it’s important enough to show to me in it’s entirety.
12. People who spend most of their time rationalizing the familiar; holding themselves back and settling for jobs/housing/lives/dreams that are not what they truly want because they are “known quantities”.
13. People who spend most of their energies on reification (Verdinglichung). Stop trying to turn every nuance of interplay between people and expression of human interaction into a thing, a commodity, to be traded and marketed.