Churning the annoyed

Writing several different blogs, and keeping one eye on my future career, I read a certain amount of blogs from the problogging community (you know those people that are making a living by being bloggers). And one of the things occasionally kicked around those circles is that you are probably not doing a good job as a blogger if you are not making people upset.

Now, I like annoying people. I am good at it. Not as good as Scott Adams (Dilbert). But I am working on it.

Unfortunately, one of the communities I blog in is the Golden Dawn community. Due to the mud-slinging that surrounded a certain trademark lawsuit and the constant "my group is better than your group" bear-baiting, the community (or at least, some members of it) believe that we should not upset anyone. No flaming, no bear-baiting, and no telling people that they are headed in the wrong direction.

Last night, I was reminded of this as I wrote a series of short rants about some of the things I recently read on the corner of the internet Golden Dawn has rooted in. It was a post that promises to annoy everyone, except for the couple of people who tend to keep a low profile or generally don't give a shit (it is hard to target and annoy people like that).

When I got done writing the post, I thought about not publishing it. Then I said, "What the heck. This stuff needs to be said, and anyone who does not like it does not have to read my blog in the first place."

I had at least one person unsubscribe...it is hard to tell how many people left (there is a difference between visible and invisible subscribers)...one never really knows how many actual subscribers one has. Nevertheless, for me, it is a sign that I am still pushing the limits. The day when everyone agrees with me, well, I will probably be at a funeral...my own.

(Just to clarify, the Golden Dawn community is really small---one visible unsubscriber {they commented that they were unsubscribing} is a lot for that market. Of course, it will annoy someone that I call Golden Dawn a market...and a small market at that---see I can't help myself: my nature is to annoy.)