wolog.net - March 19th 2005

Date:	2005-03-19 01:16
Subject:	How it feels to be an outsider.
Security:	Public
Mood:	frustrated / irrelevant

At SXSW, i learned that in order to be relevant, one must:

Have a blog, and update it two or three times a day. Bonus points for recording and posting video. The blog must run on fashionable blogging software; LiveJournals do not count.
Be a talented photographer and shoot beautiful images for decorating the blog.
Know CSS in detail and use it to make one’s pages gorgeous. All pages must validate perfectly. Bonus points for using unusual designerly typefaces or doing some crazy CSS trick no one else has thought of.
Read at least 50 or 60 other blogs every day, and comment on them. (And they must be the right ones. Bonus points for using aggregator software to suck in hundreds or thousands of blogs.)
Formally identify popular or famous people as friends on one’s blogroll.
Constantly monitor several incoming pubsub feeds on interesting topics.
Have a profile on Technorati and monitor several watchlists there.
Post ten or so pictures on Flickr every day.
Add a few dozen links to del.icio.us every day, and tag them with popular tags.
Have written a book (or a few books).

These are minimum requirements; to actually be considered interesting you must also do something exceptional or creative beyond these basic tasks, such as inventing a new blog-related technology, championing a controversial point of view, or running your own design company. Fail to meet the listed requirements, and you might as well not exist; it won’t matter what you have to say, what ideas you have, what you invent, or how hard you work, because no one who matters is listening.

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