Before I explain the title, a bit of explanation as to why I came up with that title. This morning, I saw this blatant call for blogrolling, and I just had to say something. I’m always amused when somebody does one of those linkbait schemes, half because they are so blatantly callous, and half because they work. Yeah, they work.
With goings on in my life, I’ve realized that rather than begging for links or attention the past few months, I’ve been consciously avoiding it. It was after I went around to other blogs, looking at their designs, and noticing old plugins, I decided to make up my own holiday. While pimping my post around the blogohextrahedron, I realized it was the first time in months I’d wanted attention. Even then it was half-hearted, just as my perfunctory self-linking on del.icio.us when I do something sorta-kinda worth linking.
I go by a motto that I tend to forget:
You get some of what you ask for, and none of what you don’t
That’s how it is in the advertising business, the blogging business, the SEO game, and the rest of life. You’ll never get to date a supermodel until you ask a supermodel out. Sure, I’ll never date one, but that’s only because of my fantastically horribly empty bank account. That, and my timid-as-a-sheep attitude towards women.
But if you’re not asking people to link you, they probably won’t link you. If you ask people to add you to their Technorati Favorites, some people will. I’ve asked people on multiple occasions to add me to their del.icio.us network, because I understand that part of the linking game is growing a network of other users, and using them in turn to find others.
It’s that advertising I was talking about. You go up to a pretty girl, and you show off your gold chains and fine cut on your polyester pants. No lady can resist all that chest hair, so you know you’re not going home empty-handed. Not you, no - you’re the man!
And that’s where OBSOI comes in. I honestly thought I’d find a lot more entries with a Google search, but I guess the acronym never caught on. It’s a shame, because it’s a good one. It’s stands for Overblown Sense Of Importance.
With all the blogs, bloggers, and what I laughingly refer to as journalists, you’d think that would make it into the lexicon. Alas, I seem to be the only one who uses OBSOI on a regular basis. It’s not my invention, I saw it from a fine stand-up comedian, I think, back in the 80s. This acronym stuck with me because of my personal fear that I would ever get it.
In a bit of reversal of fortunes, I started a blog a while back, and got into politics, and found that I became as close to a big-shot as I’d ever want to be. Not hardly close to fame, but within throwing distance, and I didn’t like it. In fact, I’ve done a lot of things over the past couple of years that I thought I would like, and came to regret. That’s what happens when you let ego drive your decisions.
Not to say that ego, and self-importance, don’t matter - they do. You want to feel like you’ve got some pull in the universe. But more times than not, as you move towards confidence, you start pushing towards arrogance. That’s why, when I redesigned this site, I structured it to be as ego-free as possible.
- There’s no comments. This can be good (if nobody ever commented) or bad (if the comments section totally rocked). I’m an awesome commenter, and my comment section always rocks, yet there is none here. It’s all about deflation.
- The only visible source of interaction with the outside world involves signing up for del.icio.us or pinging a post. Also, by design. While I’m all about sharing the story, I purposefully decided on del.icio.us as my linking service, since it was still private enough, yet social enough. The best of both worlds in my book.
- No hit counters, blogrolls, network affiliations - there’s precious little here to tell you how popular the place is. There’s the Zeitgeist, still a work in progress and the syndication page, but that really only tells you how few people use the feeds.
- The setup here appears to be anti-gaming. In fact, the only reason I have a Technorati category is because tags are my favorite microformat. I’m fascinated at other people’s fascination with tags, and how tagging is part of this Web 2.0 movement.
On Wednesday, I went into the WordPress options, and removed a bunch of the pinging services I had set up. There were over 30 of them, set to update whenever I published a story. While Ping-o-matic is more that sufficient, that drive to popularity had me pinging the world, telling everybody there’s some new, fresh, hot content, just waiting to be enjoyed. Until Wednesday, that is.
It seems ironic that I would write a post detailing how awesome I am at being humble. I write it mostly to explain that I know exactly how to get thousands of hit a day, I just choose not to. I said it before, and I’ll say it again, I like my island. Some people need their lives validated through mouseclicks - I don’t.
That first link up there, the one about blogrolling: it was a joke. He’s an SEO guy, and he was just messing with his established audience. The net effect of his blog post being that I’ve been thinking of my obsession with averageness (a real word), and how to use a call to action to get results. I like the idea, and he’s running a good campaign.
If I were doing something similar, I’d be saying “add me to your Technorati whoozits,” or “delicious me!” But I’m not, so I don’t, and I won’t. If it were me, I’d stick the periods in ‘delicious.’ I’m anal retentive like that. But I’m not, so I didn’t, and I wouldn’t.
If there was any call to action, it would be to go ahead and blogroll Mr. Egghead, just because there’s no love lost in links. Just because MacStansbury.com is blogroll gnostic doesn’t mean your site doesn’t have to be. The focus of SEO Egghead being optimizing advertising, you’d think that’d be in line with the goals. I don’t think I can say you’ve got OBSOI when you’re fulfilling your stated mission.
While I don’t have a mission, per se, I do like to think I write an occasional good line. I really do this just for me now, just to keep my massive ego in check. You’ll get along better in life the day you realize that stats are not the measure of a man.
