While a lot of people in the tech blog circles have a tendency to scoff at interwebs practices like forwarding funny emails, adding animated gifs to email signatures, and spiffy-fying their own blogs with graphical counters, they are (for some inexplicable reason) falling pray to something just as useless and diabolic – the blog tag meme.
I think it started with the “5 things you didn’t know about me” blog tag. Even I succumbed to that one – as did countless others – it seemed like everyone else was doing it – it was all in good fun. But after seeing the success of “5 things” others decided to launch new ones like “5 books I read”, “5 magazines I read“, “5 reasons I blog” and the list seems to just keep growing.
But today I’m taking a stand. No more blog tag posts. Won’t post them and I won’t read them. I am chaining myself to the high-horse I rode in on and boycotting all blog tag memes.
This glorified email forward concept is sullying even the most useful and respected blogs. I say this practice should be confined to the likes of MySpace, Friendster (if that still exists), and Facebook. The only difference between these tag posts and ‘ye-olde-chain-letter-craparoo is that the ending has changed from “If you break the chain and don’t forward this email, your privates will fall off and you will die a horrible death” to “now tag 5 more of your friends and make them blog about their favorite [insert something useless here]“.
For the sake of everything that’s holy – stop this blog tag insanity. The practice is becoming as useless as John Chow’s “blog reviews” (sorry Chowie, no backlink for you).
Oh, and one last thing – please email this post to your 5 closest friends and link to me from 5 of your own blog posts. If you don’t your privies will fall off and you will die a horrible death.
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