Rants, Raves and Ruminations
"All that guy ever does on his blog is bitch and moan."
That's a quote I've heard attributed to me and my site more than once over the years... It's really quite untrue and I wanted to address it here once and for all. I consider this spot a public outlet for my unfiltered thoughts and analysis, not just a place to come to bitch. Sometimes I write nice solid rants, sometimes ethusiastic raves, sometimes reasoned ruminations, but they're all mixed together. Maybe I could go back and count up the numbers and see if I rant more than I rave or ruminate more, but I think it's pretty even across the board.
So, for future reference, let me clarify these basic categories so I can point to this in the future.
A "rant" is where I jump up and down on something because it annoyed me for whatever reason. I seem to be pretty good at whinging and bitching, as those are the posts that get the most attention from the blogosphere. I get link backs all the time with "here's Russell going off again on x" or "oh, god, Russ is losing his mind again" despite the fact that I may really bitch about something only once every couple of weeks or so. Maybe I have a talent at criticising stuff in a way that gets a lot of attention, but it's hardly all that I write here. Yes, when I get to the point that I'm ready to rant, I'm do tend to open up with both barrels - I'm not saying I don't - but there's a lot more worth reading here.
A "rave" in my mind is when I talk about how cool something is. This is usually my first gut impressions of a product or service or maybe it's a result of using something over time and seeing how it really affected my life positively. I write about how *lots* of things are cool as there's a lot of neat stuff out there. I don't link to every new thing in the world, but if I do link to it and write about it, its because I feel something about it and want to express an opinion. Lots of people ping me and say, "oh - such and such just launched," but if I don't care one way or another, I don't write about it here (that's called "work"), I only write when inspired to do so. If I rave about something, there's usually a reason for it.
Ruminations are everything else - and can range from my thoughts of my childhood, news of my kid, or analysis of new market trends, reviews of phones or new products to ideas for new businesses or features. I write lots of these as well, and in fact, these are the main incentive for writing this blog. I love just getting this stuff out there, and I love getting feedback on it as well. It bothers me that the only thing people link to are when I'm ripping something apart - because I feel I've written lots of constructive ideas as well. Did you see that post the other day about an MMS-to-Classifieds gateway service? I thought that was awesome, and yet I didn't get one link or email about it. That's not my fault.
Anyways, I'm just writing this to explain that I'm not some bipolar freak who just writes nutty attacks on whatever just to get attention. I really try to write about things I care about and add analysis as well. And not just one-line opinions on top of links to news or posts from other people, but real reasoned thinking.
I will note that neither the rants or the raves or even my general thoughts are really the stuff everyone else is interested in either. The most consistently popular pages on this site have nothing to do with PR people's intelligence, Web 2.0 or even Apple computer (the stuff linked to by all the bloggers out there) nor my next brilliant business idea. Rather, they're the posts I've written which attract Searchers, like the one about the apps on my Nokia 6680, the review of the Motorola RAZR and the news about Verizon disabling Bluetooth. This what a majority of people in the world are concerned enough about to type into a search engine and find my site. It makes sense in a way, but it's nice to get that perspective.
:-)
-Russ