Rise of the Tablog

The blog format has devolved. Once a simple gateway to self-publishing, today the blog format is responsible for a thousand tawdry tablogs: hideous half-breeds of tabloid and blog built around odeous content, cluttered site designs, and optimised for pageviews alone. To understand how it happened, it helps to see what changed when blogging moved from a pastime to a cottage industry — the same point, for me, when writing and reading blogs stopped being fun.

It’s frightfully hard to write a blog without feeling that it must do something: even the most humble blogger is encouraged to create a unique selling point, target a ‘laser-focussed niche’, embrace social media, spawn viral content, track stats, and have a dedicated marketing drive; they must teach and inspire, build ‘authority’, start a ‘conversation’, and foster a ‘community’; they should seek out a purpose, a gameplan, a revenue stream, and an exit strategy.

This socially enforced framework creates problems, not least of which in changing Web writing from an expressive, emotive celebration of free speech to an electronic stocking filler: tabloggers aren’t writing; they’re creating content — content that hopes to satisfy self-inflicted quotas, boost traffic, and burn another post on the digital altar to appease the blods. Tabloggers write from a sense of obligation; a feeling that their content must be regular and — worst of all — useful. And I’m not alone in thinking that it’s a shame:

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information. ~ Oscar Wilde

Yet tablogs publish the ugliest kind of useful information: vacuous lists, tutorials, and recycled how-tos that try so hard to be handy as to become meaningless, soulless, voiceless and occasionally dangerous. I believe that tablogging is inevitable if you adopt the blog format, a platform that does little more for its authors than cast their writing into oblivion thanks to its hallmark, reverse chronological sorting. Indeed, sorting articles by date may be the worst possible setup for all content types except news.¹

In an attempt to combat this death by archive effect, the blog format offers its own curious blend of useless navigational clutter: fluffy tag clouds, monstrous category lists, ‘possibly related’ entries, and ‘most commented’ posts. Sadly, the result is the emergence of the blog aesthetic: a distinctive look that is neither beautiful nor usable. Indeed, you know that you’ve landed on a tablog if you spend the first twenty seconds wondering what the hell its author intended you to do next.

Add to this the machine gun calls to action in the form of me-too social networks, overpriced affiliate promotions, and chocolate box ad matrices, and what you have is a shit tip of information design. It’s gotten so bad that a wealth of plugins and scripts have sprung up to strip pages back to useful content and make them legible again.²

The result of all this is that it’s even harder to find blogs that you can read for pleasure. Whereas reading offline is for downtime, reading online has been demoted to killing time, and tablogging is to blame. I think it’s time that well-meaning publishers abandoned the blog format in favour of something more suitable for their content, their audience, and their long-term prosperity.

I ditched the format when I saw what it was becoming. It’s saved my time, my sanity, my love of writing, and my desire to waffle on like a Belgian baker³ without wondering what extra crap I can add to my sidebar. As such, there’s no comment field at the foot of this essay, a fact that will sadden some — no doubt the same few who have long scrolled past this paragraph having never read it, pinkies primed to peck out a tired counter argument: ‘but it’s about creating a two-way dialogue,’⁴ they’d say. ‘Read-write instead of read only’⁵ or some fluffy computing analogy.

When people tell me they want to start a website, my first response is not the knee-jerk shout of ‘start a blog!’ or ‘use WordPress!’ that echoes elsewhere, but a simple question: what are you trying to do?

• If you are trying to foster a community, build a dedicated site that caters to your users’ needs and rewards their participation, like Stack Overflow has.
• If you are trying to meet people with similar interests, co-ordinate meetings using Meetup or Eventbrite, or host great events like Carsonified does.
• If you are trying to make money online, start a business with an obvious group of products, benefits, and prices, like 37signals.
• If you are trying to promote an existing business, invest your money in improving your current site and your time in guest posting on established platforms.
• If you are trying to write tutorials or spread expert knowledge, start a dedicated tutorial business like PeepCode or Lynda.
• If you are trying to become an expert in your field, either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about, like Lance Armstrong.
• If you are trying to share links, keep a diary, or post notebook-style tipbits, use a simple service that you’ll update, like Posterous, Tumblr, Soup, or Twitter.
• If you are trying to waste what’s left of your childhood or recapture your youth, use social networking sites like Facebook or Virb.
• If you are trying to set up a shop, head for a secure platform like Big Cartel, or Shopify, or communities like Etsy.
• If you are trying to showcase your work, use a dedicated portfolio site that headhunters are already browsing, like Krop.
• If you are writing for love, prove it: use a format that puts your content first, like McSweeney’s.

For everything that the blog format has been adapted for, there’s a healthier alternative that won’t steer you ever closer towards running a tablog. Indeed, even if you hope to start — heavens help you — a blog about blogging, there are better formats than the blog format. Which begs the question, why use it at all?