Thirteen Blog Clichés
I started out in early 2004 as a blog skeptic. But over the last four years, I've become a born-again believer. In that time, I've written almost a thousand blog entries, and I've read thousands upon thousands of blog entries.
Context & Ripple Effects
Jeff Atwood's piece lands in the middle of an unusual cluster of blog-about-blogging posts: within six weeks of August 2007, Marc Andreessen had published his eleven lessons learned about blogging, Kent Newsome mapped the five stages from creation to abandonment, and the Wall Street Journal marked its own blog anniversary. Atwood's contribution is a skeptic's-turns-convert angle — three-plus years and nearly a thousand entries after starting out doubtful in early 2004.
What distinguishes it inside that cluster is the negative form: instead of advice, a catalog of thirteen overused tropes, written by someone with enough volume behind him to claim pattern recognition rather than opinion.
First-order effects
- Atwood converts his own archive into authority — the thousand-entry corpus is the credential that lets Coding Horror critique the medium while fully participating in it.
Second-order effects
- The post feeds a feedback loop already visible among named peers: Andreessen, Newsome, and the Journal each produced meta-commentary within weeks, so each new listicle gives the others fresh material to respond to.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, blogging self-critique consolidates into a recognized subgenre where established bloggers' retrospectives become recurring traffic events in their own right — commentary about the platform becoming as durable as any single topic written on it.
The trend: Mid-2007 marks the point where blogging matures enough to sustain a self-referential literature, with veteran practitioners' lessons-learned lists becoming a genre of their own.