Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Blogger Laws

First Law - The more self-important a blogger feels he or she is, the less likely they are to acknowledge or reply to an email from someone who disagrees with them.

Second Law - The more self-important a blogger feels he or she is, the less likely they are to feel loyalty to a blogger coalition, especially one formed or joined before they became self-important.

Third Law - The objective political insight of a blogger is inversely proportional to their actual real-life experience in politics.

Fourth Law - If a blogger has children, one-half to three-quarters of their posts must be regarding cute things their kids have done, are doing, or will be doing sometime in the future.

       Lileks' Corollary - If your child is extra cute, it will be given a nickname, like "Gnat" or "LilZ" or "BusyBaby" or "Tink".

Fifth Law - Free Republic and Democratic Underground exist in entirely separate planes of existence, and any sign of common ground between their readers would signal the end of civilization as we know it.

Sixth Law - If a female blogger posts a picture of herself on her site, her traffic will double. If she posts a semi-nude picture of herself on her site and hints about sex, her traffic will triple. If she posts a nude picture of herself on her site and talks explicitly about sex, she will appear on CNN.

Seventh Law - Dan Rather and Trent Lott will never be bloggers, nor invite one to dinner, nor allow their daughters or granddaughters to marry one.

Eighth Law - Spam not, lest ye be banned.

Ninth Law - Memes and Quizilla quizzes are not a substitute for original posting. A bloggers credibility index is inversely proportional to the number of memes and Quizilla quizzes they post each day.

Tenth Law - No matter how much people drop in the PayPal jar at your site, pajamas are not tax-deductable. Neither are tin-foil hats.

Eleventh Law - If you are reading these laws and have violated any of them, it's not your fault. It's the mainstream media's fault.

UPDATE:

Twelfth Law - People who do not understand and ridicule blogs will be blogged about. Their confusion and objections to what bloggers write about their misunderstandings will be blogged. Their protests regarding bloggers' reactions about their original objections will be blogged. And so on. This is known as the Circle of Life.

       Klein's Corollary - There is no such thing as an innocent remark.

Thirteenth Law - Merely linking to a site that supports your position does not prove the point, and multiple links do not necessarily prove the point. In fact, the number of linked sites that support your point is inversely proportional to the point's factual validity. This is also known as the "Quality, not Quantity" Law.

Fourteenth Law - The number of regular commenters to a particular blog is equal to:

# of daily posts about your family and job +
# of daily posts about the weather and where you live +
# of daily posts about politics +
# of daily posts about animals
X the number of times you mention sex.

       Bubba's Corollary - The more extreme your political views, the greater the number of sycophantic commenters and the fewer the number of objective commentors.

Keep them coming in the comments!

1 comment:

  1. I hate to be annoying, but here goes...

    I was so excited when you used the singular pronouns "he or she" to refer to the antecedent "a blogger," but was shot down with that ever-present gender-neutral PLURAL "they" that appeared in the second clause of the first few blogger laws. "A blogger" is clearly singular and any pronoun used to refer back to it must also be singular.

    signed,
    a nerdette

    ReplyDelete