A Kindness of Bloggers....and a Fix for Blogger

Image via CrunchBase

In the relatively short time I have been blogging, since April 2009, I have noticed that the overwhelming number of bloggers with whom I have come into contact have been distinguished by their kindness and their respect for other peoples' views.

I have learned a great deal from them.
They have given me new interests, have opened my eyes to photography and styles of music I would never have turned on by choice - have even changed my mind, whose nature normally resembles that of a army pack mule.

Ayak, whose blog about her life in Turkey was one of the first I found, has singlehandedly turned me from someone convinced that if I pressed something the entire contents of the computer would disappear down the plughole to someone that can now copy and paste without having a nervous breakdown.

Phil, whose wonderful Blogitandscarper is in abeyance at the moment, opened my eyes to what could be done with images.

Owen, whose Magic Lantern Show made me use my eyes when out and about.

The Diary of Amy Rigby, which opened up worlds of music which had passed me by, not to speak of an introduction to living in the U.S.A.

Mark, at Views from the Bikeshed, who offered sound advice on layout and whose blog continually makes me think and assess.

I am currently indebted to Perpetua, who has not only kindly offered to lead me through the weird world of Wordpress but who has also signalled a fix for the latest Blogger problem.

If you have been affected by the roll out of assigning your blog URL to a country suffix rather than to the old blogspot.com, with subsequent loss of the easy change tools on your dashboard, then she has the answer here.
She has suggested that everyone passes the fix on, as we all have differing circles of readers, to give maximum help to as many as possible.

Steve at Bloggertropolis has been posting recently about the changes in blogging...the growing commercialism...and I'm sure that this change in Blogger is to enable Google to attract more advertisers by using the blogging community to better effect.

He has also noticed that a number of blogs he followed have died off, or even out, and I've noticed the same phenomenon.
Is it because people now don't have the same time for blogging...are too busy running to stand still trying to make a living, so that unless their blog attracts money it's not worth pursuing?

I blog less these days...partly as a consequence of my husband enjoying much better health.
Blogging was something that occupied the long night hours of waiting and watching, pushing worry away by concentrating on something else.
Now, I frequently think
'Oh, I'd like to blog about that...' but find that life is too full to make the time and the moment has passed.

I get rather put off by the 'big' blogs....the product reviews, the puffs for restaurants, fashions, etc...
There doesn't seem to be the contact with the blogger that you find on the smaller ones, which is what I value.
The exception to that being The Slog, imprinted as it is with the character of its author and on its way to be being a monster blog.


It is not to say that everything in the blogging world is lovely.....

Some of the 'living the dreamers' react with virulence to any explicit or implicit criticism of their beloved France, as if they had been poked in the eye with a sharp stick.

Some of the 'mummy bloggers' make you think yourself grateful not to be within reach of their backbiting and eye scratching.

But, in my part of the blogging world at least, things are civilised.

Thank you fellow bloggers!

Here be dragons....

Image by spratmackrel via Flickr

A blogger whose posts I follow with pleasure has suffered a mishap recently, having fallen foul of the Mummy Bloggers..or some of them..or one of them...hard to know what's what with the Mummy Bloggers.

I had heard of them, in passing, but not being a dedicated follower of fashion they had passed me by in my rural backwater.

Until the blogger I follow had trouble with them, or her, or whatever part of the gallimaufry had inadvertently been roused....

So I took a look.

Goodness, what an abyss opened under my feet!

Pictures of children at birthday parties with a ratio of more than two parents to one child which would indicate all divorced, separated or sex changed partners wanted pictures of the event...

Sad pictures of children eating a birthday tea surrounded by a sea of adults with cameras...

It reminded me of the father who had booked our main house for his holiday with his family.

He spent most of the time with his video recorder filming his sweet little girl playing with the ducks and their ducklings, collecting eggs with Mr.Fly, helping to round up the chickens in the evening...with never a thought that it would have been much more fun for his little girl if he had joined in rather than recording the French rural idyll for the delectation of friends and family on his return

.

Reviews of cereals you would not feed to a self respecting dog, given the contents....

Posts about how to communicate with PR people....whose clients apparently seek the cachet of being approved by the Mummy Bloggers.

Given the view of their offspring offered by their posts - to be fair this is not a representative sample, just me jumping from blog to blog - I would not base my launch of beasty flavoured soya animal shapes on the sample offered, but I suppose that's not the idea.
The idea is to get the Mummy Bloggers to talk about the product.
Which they do. 

Snarly, bitchy exchanges totally opaque to the outsider...almost French in their intensity...and the regular appearance of that worst bitchiness of all...
Of course, she needs help....
That phrase, to me, sums up what I found so off putting in the blogs I looked at...the sugary, false expression of concern while the knife goes in the back.

These blogs seem so self regarding, when their purpose, their leitmotif, purports to be sharing what it is to be a  parent, which demands so much self abnegation and which can give such joy.

Where is the joy in these blogs?
Missing. Gone AWOL.
There have to be other blogs, where people just talk about their lives and their kids, the ups and the downs, but following the trail I did, I didn't find any.

Given the bait of goodies,or invites, we might all be tempted to do product reviews and push our stats up...but when I learn that the summit of ambition is to have an award ceremony during a weekend at Butlins...my heart misgives me.


Is it really worth all the back biting to have a weekend at Butlins?


(I apologise for the italics...I pressed something which refuses to be unpressed, so please do not read added importance to the text thus italicised.)


Having surfed the surface of the genre, I think I can divide the participants into two groups.....


One...the Sir Jaspers, sure of their ground as middle class mummys...mummies?...and keen to enforce the line of those above and below the salt where it comes to the distribution of pushchairs, cereal samples and invitations to product launches.


The other...the 'she was poor but she was honest' group, who would very much like, like Israel Hands, to get their mitts on the  pickles and the wines monopolised by group one...and somewhat vocal when they don't succeed.


Going  back to the comments on the blog of the unfortunate offender, I was struck by the number of contributions by Mummy Bloggers who, while clearly having an I.D. for Mummy Blogging, preferred anonymity when making comments on the blog concerned.


What does this indicate about the world of Mummy Blogging?


That it can be nasty, brutish and short....unless you are a Sir Jasper.