Larry, of OF Blog of the Fallen, sparked a bit of debate the other day when he grumbled about blogs trending towards promotional giveaways and other easy-way-out content that leads to pageviews, but not necessarily to intelligent content. In essence, Larry’s annoyed that more and more blogs seem to be losing their voice, and replacing it with that of the publishers who send them free books.
From his post, title When do you ever stop whoring yourself out?:
Lately, I’ve been a bit…disinterested…in following quite a few blogs. This isn’t about 1 or 2 or even a handful of blogs, but more about some that are in my blogroll, others that are not. At times, I find myself wanting to take on the role of the reader, of the person who receives book suggestions rather than providing all sorts of info on the books old and new worth reading. But too often, I’m not finding that when I’m browsing through a couple dozen blogs a day.
Instead, I’m finding more and more space devoted to this contest or that giveaway. For a few blogs, that is virtually all of their content. They don’t ever say much of anything about the books being pimped out. When a review is written, too often it feels rather vague and as if the punches were pulled back some. Just this sense of CYA, I guess.
Realistically, this is both a problem and, at the same time, not a problem. Sure, it sucks that some blogs are little more than extensions of the PR departments of various publishers, but at the same time, the beautiful thing about the web is that poor content is easy to ignore. Joe Sherry, in the first reply to Larry’s post, sums it up pretty well:
The promotional blog is something that is pretty well designed to make me stop following / reading it.
I use Google Reader to browse most of the blogs I read. It’s great, it syncs with my iPod and makes keeping up with near 100 blogs rather painless. It’s also great, because I can skip all the shit content that’s thrown at me, if I so desire. I’ve got a pretty good system worked out that invovles clicking through to the blogs that post good content and forgetting about the stuff I don’t care about. Rather than damning poor content, I prefer to reward good content.
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