The Arrogance of Bloggers

Posted by Sarah Mitchell on 8 September 2011 | 14 Comments

Tags: blogging, blog

Have you spotted arrogant bloggers? It’s taken me a long while to admit to being a blogger. If you read my first post, you’ll see how uncomfortable I was with the idea of keeping a blog. I worried about saying anything relevant. What I didn’t share was my worry about establishing a vanity vehicle for my own opinion. It struck me as an arrogant thing to do. I see a lot of arrogance amongst bloggers and it drives me nuts.

What do you mean by arrogance?
I’m not talking about arrogant opinions of writers or arrogant topics on a blog. I’m speaking about arrogant behaviour in people keeping a blog. A web log –or blog – is intended to attract, engage, discuss and share your ideas. It’s on the internet precisely for these reasons, to create an interactive community of people. Bloggers all over the world yearn for someone to read what they’ve written and comment on it. And yet I see people circumvent the spirit of blogging all the time.

4 ways bloggers demonstrate their arrogance
Here are four ways bloggers express their arrogance and, in some cases, disdain for their readers.

• Me, me and more me – I’ve written about it before, the stifling inward focus of a blog. Unless someone is an absolute expert in a field, I don’t want to read a personal tome to the writer’s own greatness. I want the writer to pull me in, to make me relate their points to my own experience. The experts know this, only amateurs prattle on about themselves.
• Gated content – Every fibre of my content marketing soul says I shouldn’t have to pay for gated content, especially on a blog. I’m still grappling with the idea of pay walls for newspapers but I will never, ever, pay to read someone’s blog. Ever.
• When I read something good, I want to share it. If there’s no sharing widget or even a tweet button, I find it incredibly annoying. Ideally, I like to see a universal button that allows me to pick my network. In lieu of that, please provide the top three: Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
• Unanswered comments – I’ve written more than one post about commenting. Nothing - but nothing - smacks of arrogance more than someone who writes a blog post and won't answer comments. It’s akin to ignoring someone speaking to you in person and an indication your readers are not worthy of your attention. Even the blogging greats monitor comments and answer when appropriate including Darren Rowse, Joe Pulizzi and Jonathan Crossfield. And, yes, I know Seth Godin doesn’t answer comments but he doesn’t allow them either. When you get on his blog, you know it’s a one-way discussion before the first word.

Honest ignorance or intentional arrogance?
Some of these mistakes are made out of honest ignorance. I’ll retweet an article even without a sharing widget but I’m a lot more likely to do it if I get a leg-up from the blog owner. I never read gated blog content. I rarely go back to a blogger-centric site. The one that hurts the most is unanswered comments. It’s a terrible feeling to pour your heart into a comment and get no reply from the writer.

If you have no intention of interacting or helping people participate in your blog, I recommend you switch mediums. Keep a diary or an offline journal but leave the blogosphere to the goons like me – people who are looking for information and entertainment and want to have a good old chin wag about it.

Where do you see arrogant behaviour in the blogging community?

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Image credit: What is your conversation strategy? by cambodia4kidsorg, on Flickr