[Story.]

Why? Because the same people are writing about the same things they were when I started, with the difference being that we’re all drunk with consulting work so the writing is shittier (or we’ve hired a college student to do it for us), and more people are inserting themselves into the “conversation” to make a quick buck every single day.

I don’t really have the energy or the inclination for a full rant here, but I stumbled upon (and I don’t mean Stumbled Upon) this post by Steve Rubel (who is a friend) and had to at least spew something or other. See, I don’t read Micro Persuasion (or a lot of other blogs) regularly like I used to, and though I’m a fan I’ve never been an avid reader just ’cause I’m not a tech geek. So I just thought I’d check in to see what’s doin’.

So we get Steve saying too many bloggers are writing lazy, boring shit, which they are, and then we have Steve promising to try to do better, which in all probability he simply won’t have time to do, and then we have a bunch of commenters who might as well have written their posts in 2005. Commenters bitching that Steve is ignoring them; commenters kissing Steve’s ass in hopes of some future link love; and even Jeremy Pepper, who still hasn’t tired of his little snipes at Steve after all these friggin’ years.

Does anyone wonder now why I’d prefer to do blog posts about Paris and Lindsay having vag slips in Africa?

I’m like Jack on the bridge in the season finale of Lost last year, only I don’t want to go back to Blog Island. I want to blow up Blog Island.

I think the best thing that could happen to improve the quality of blogging would be to shut down Digg, Techmeme and Twitter; for Google to stop indexing blog content; and for Technorati (even as f’ed up as it already is) to go away,too. Then you’d have people blogging who actually give two shits about what they’re writing.

Today finding worthwhile content online is like looking for the best ballet dancer in a mosh pit. Good luck with that.

You may know we’ve long had ambivalent feelings toward Digg. While we’ve been a member for a year and a half now, we haven’t exactly been an active user. But now that Digg is embroiled in so much controversy, and virtually every client is asking about the site, I decided I should at least play around with it a little bit more. If you’d like to play with me, go to my profile page and add me as a friend.

(And for the three or four of you who actually got the Saturday Night Fever refererence in the headline, I won’t tell anybody if you won’t.)

Actually, if you don’t mind, let’s try something else.

See, we generally will not click on a list-based blog post anymore, so if you didn’t click on this one for that reason, we don’t blame you. (If you did click on this because of the list, bear with us for a moment.)

Lists are about the surest indicator of a lazy mind you will find online these days — like bulging, vacant eyes are the surest sign of a sociopath.

But since you came here for a list, we’ll give you two:

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4 Reasons Bloggers Like Lists

1. You can write a list without knowing how to write. No need to organize your thoughts into a natural narrative flow. No need to build momentum around a thesis. Any idiot can put two sentences (or in this case, three sentences) together and then go on to the number 2.

2. Lists confer an authority you don’t really have. It’s great to read a post from a 19-year-old Digger who says there are “8 Ways” to do anything. Let’s be clear: There are eight ways that you know of, or think you know of, because your Mommy, Daddy, and your geek buddies told you about them. The other 57 ways, you have no clue about. Oh, and by the way, six of your eight ways are simplistic bullshit, and the other two ways, everybody with two brain cells to rub together already knows.

3. Blog lists require an equal balance of verbal and math skills. For example, the ability to count to 10 is fairly commensurate with the verbal wherewithal needed to compose most 10-point blog lists. So if your head hurts after writing up 7 points, that’s your little brain telling you to stop there.

4. Blog readers like them.

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4 Reasons Blog Readers Like Lists

1. They can be skimmed easily. Most people don’t read this part of the entry; they just read the bolded title, “They can be skimmed easily,” and move on to number 2. Reading this far probably means you’re either really bored or that you received a perfect score on the reading comprehension portion of the SAT. Congratulations.

2. You can stop at any time. Many people get confused trying to follow a person’s idea from one paragraph to the next. Each point in a list is self-contained, so you can stop at any time without getting disoriented or light-headed.

3. Lists make you think the blogger knows what he’s talking about. The blogger’s “8 Ways to Make Money Online with a Digital Camera and Your Girlfriend” follows in the rich tradition of Moses’ 10 Commandments and Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points. This is true even though six of the “8 ways” are bullshit, and the other two ways, everybody with two brain cells to rub together already knows. Which brings us to number 4.

4. Lists tell you things you already know. And who doesn’t get a little ego boost from that?

A little less than a year ago, I decided to start a community Web site for people like me — as scary a thought as that is.

I figured that Media Orchard’s success (we peaked in the top 3,000 blogs on Technorati and for about a year averaged 1,200 unique visitors daily) had to mean that there was a broad appetite for the kind of stories that I was interested in. You know — a goofy assortment of news and commentary, filtered for the interests of creative types in media, marketing and PR.

It started out great — in fact, we reached 800 unique visitors daily within a few months, with steady growth — but frankly, at one year in, we haven’t been able to take it to the next level.

In case you’re wondering: I will not give up on this.

Here’s why:

About a year ago, after getting several of my posts on the home page of Fark and Digg and seeing traffic explode, I had a bit of an epiphany. I thought, Here I am, getting 100,000+ hits for a single post – and why?

Because it’s my best post? No — absolutely not. It’s because a single gatekeeper (in the case of Fark or Memeorandum) or a small online clique (in the case of Digg) said it is. I call Digg a clique, rather than an egalitarian community, because it is structured to heavily favor the submissions of a very small number of people. These people essentially call the shots for the site (and, in some cases, have collected money to post content.)

Although I love Fark and like both Digg and Memeorandum, the more I learned, the more I really didn’t like knowing how the sausage was made. I also didn’t like seeing all the ways my colleagues in the business were gaming the system. As someone who came from a print journalism background, the whole process seemed a little seedy to me — certainly far from a meritocracy.

So I thought, what if I could create a community site — for people with interests similar to mine — where submitters didn’t have to worry about being “greenlighted” or making the home page?

That’s why I created Spin Thicket.

We’ve hit a number of obstacles along the way that have been educational, such as:

• Managing Google, which like a light switch decided last spring to reclassify much Spin Thicket content to its supplemental index. We’ve been fighting our way back from that one ever since.

• Overcoming Technorati, which booted us from its index last spring also. I guess you could say that as an aggregator we deserved it — but at the time, Memeorandum, which has NO original content, was being indexed by Technorati, so I figured what the heck.

I don’t mind so much that these things have happened, because the experiences have helped me in counseling clients. I never intended to make money from the site, anyway — just to gather learnings that I could share with others. And that has certainly been the case.

I’ll be candid about something else. When you start a venture like this — as when you take most risks in life — you learn pretty quickly who your friends are. In blogging, there are people who genuinely like you and/or your blog, and there are others who just want to leverage your influence and/or traffic — and who would just as soon see you fail as succeed. There are even those who very much want you to fail.

That’s just human nature, I guess.

So with that being the state of things, it makes me all the more grateful for those of you who have supported Spin Thicket over the past year. You’ve kept our little site alive, and I really, really hope it’s been worth all your time and effort. I am forever grateful for your believing in the site, and when we are able to grow this site to the size it deserves to be, it will be entirely because of you that it happened.

I’d specifically like to say a huge thank-you to the following folks:

• Cam Beck
• Alice Marshall
• Geoff Livingston
• Sara Winters
• Eric Eggertson
• Richard Becker
• Bill Green
• Kevin Dugan
• Constantine von Hoffman
• Ike Pigott
• Gracie Passette
• Owen Lystrup
• Brian Solis
• Katie Laird

I’d also like to thank my wife, Cathy, and my brother, John.

Now, a promise — I plan to keep it going as long as you want me to. You have my word on that.

Update: I meant to also thank our friends at Pierce Mattie PR for including a Spin Thicket feed on their blog sidebar; we welcome others to do the same.