Bad jokes and bloggers: Don't be an April fool

Coming home from a nice vacation always feels a bit weird. Among the reasons to be bummed is the inevitable avalanche of unopened email.

Most of us have spent hours wading through these aging e-messages. I go overseas for a month now and then, and upon return always set aside at least a day to sort it all out. This time, we were gone for only a week up in Big Sur -- but the email queues still were plenty scary.

I get a lot of SEO-related email, as requested from the top bloggers in that business. RSS is OK, but I do prefer email, perhaps just out of habit. I use a Yahoo email account for those subscriptions.

What struck me this time out was the amount of time-wasting material that flowed in from these "pro" bloggers. Taken day-to-day it's no big deal, but in a lump you can really get annoyed.

Our road trip coincided with April Fool's Day. Five days later, all that "fun" prank copy stunk like the beached dead fish we tried not to squash while hiking the coast.

Yeah, I'm a grouch and, yeah, everyone means well, but I'm not a big fan of wasting your readers' time.

One blogger devoted something like three screens' worth of copy to telling readers how to get along with Google. Stuff like, phoning the search engine engineers directly, stuffing a blog with keywords, linking out to bad neighborhoods and buying links in bulk. Readers got the joke in graf 2.

Goodwill goes a long way, of course. Shoemoney, the popular Net marketing guru, writes about wrestling now and then (yawn), and regularly posts pictures of himself wearing some company's T-shirts. I'm not complaining -- the guy gives away a lot of decent content. I do think off-topic posts are bad news when they're the blog's only entries of the day, though.

If you're writing for the public, be respectful of people's time, especially in the business arena. Injecting personality into a pro blog helps build audience loyalty -- lord knows I could use some more flare here -- but always keep in mind that goodwill is a finite resource.

That's this post's message, but if you have some time to kill, read on ...

Back to April Fool's Day: One clown decided to blog that Darren Rowse, who writes the excellent ProBlogger, had gone bankrupt and never had made more than $1,000 a month from blogging. Rowse then saw the libelous content on the Wikipedia page about him. An employee wanted to know if he'd be paid; a lot of people were confused. To make matters worse, the bogus post was time-stamped March 31.

Rowse reluctantly wrote about the incident today, also addressing spoofs in general:

"While it might be blatantly obvious to you and 99% of your readers that you’re not serious - you will fool someone. Perhaps they just read the title, perhaps the skim the post and don’t see the clues or perhaps they just believe it without question. As a result I tend to only play jokes that use my own name or reputation -- or would advise that if you’re going to involve someone else that you might want to check with them first."

Rowse isn't suing, apparently, making one joker a very lucky man. Also burned by this thing was fellow pro blogger Jeremy Shoemoney, who was falsely reported as arrested for riding a bike while intoxicated. Hic.

Rowse, for the record, has never wasted my time. Read him and learn.

And by the way ... thanks for your time.