I hate blog awards!

There, I said it.

Hate is a strong word.

I abhor, despise, detest, and loathe blog awards.

I realize I have just lost half my readers with that statement.

I never realized how much I strongly disliked blog awards until last week when I received about a hundred of them.

Okay, it was more like three but it felt like a hundred.

It was the Sunshine Award from Linda that pushed me over the edge.

The Sunshine Award is awarded to bloggers whose positivity and creativity inspire others in the blogging world.

Positivity.

Linda, you know I love you like the mother I always wished I’d had (oh, the shopping we could do), but if you give me one more fucking award I will, I will… I don’t know what I will do but it will be bad. Mark my words.

There was actually a time I liked blog awards. It was probably a month after I started blogging and I actually had a reader or two. I was given an award, I don’t remember which one because there are so many of them, and I was thrilled. I followed all the rules. I divulged 25 things about me and then dutifully passed it on to bloggers I thought were great. And then I was inundated with emails from bloggers who asked me, not so very politely, to never give them an award again.

I learned an important lesson that day. If you want to make friends in the blogosphere don’t give them awards.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the recognition and I appreciate that someone thought of me. However, I am not convinced receiving an award is a sign that someone likes you, in fact I would hazard a guess that getting a whole bunch of awards means that people don’t like what I have to say and want to potentially stop me from writing my stuff. If I have ten billion awards that I have to write about I can’t possibly find the time to talk about my squirrel problem or the blogs I hate. I’m pretty sure I am winning these awards because some people want me to shut up.

Here’s the problem with blog awards. You get one and then you have to do something with it. First of all you have to go get the award, that part is easy. But then you have to copy and paste the award into a blog post, publicly acknowledge the award (again, not difficult) and often reveal something about yourself. Something like which celebrity you’d shtup if the stars aligned and your significant other was okay with it, or 10 things about you that nobody knows. We’re bloggers for crying out loud, we reveal everything about ourselves, what don’t people already know? Nothing, that’s what.  After the tell all part we are then required to pass the horror on to 7 or 10 unsuspecting blogging friends.

When I stop at a blog and see the award at the beginning of a post I start to pray that they didn’t give it to me.

Please don’t let me be a recipient, please don’t let me be a recipient.

I suppose I could just leave the site, before anyone notices that I have been there, but that is bad form, and besides, most people know how to read their stats and can tell if I have been to their site.

Once you pass the award on to your dearest friends, and thus severed ties with them, you are required to visit their blog and make it official:

“Hey, just stopped by to let you know there’s something over at my blog for you”

(Oh, what could it be? Cookies? I fell for this the first time. I actually thought there was something over at their blog for me. It wasn’t cookies.)

You aren’t supposed to comment on the actual post, just leave the annoying comment which officially and publicly passes the burden and responsibility of the damn blog award to someone else, anyone else. It’s like a hot potato.

At least that is the right way to win a coveted blog award.

You can do what some bloggers like JD from I Do Things does and just make a page with all the awards she has won. I have to give props to JD for this, she doesn’t bother to copy and paste the actual awards, she just lists them and the giver. Of course she did an awful lot of linking and that takes some time.

Alternatively you can acknowledge the award, state how happy you are to receive it and then never do anything with it. Which is what I usually do. Though I did try to be a little honest over at How Much Longer Friday:

Thank you so much for the award! I didn’t know I was your first. I feel all proud about that. I know a lot of the bloggers you picked like Buggys and Linda, who both rock, but I don’t know the others. I’m excited about going over there and meeting them. Thanks again for the award. This is where I lie to you and tell you I will get right on giving it out but we both know I won’t get around to it because I am really very forgetful and unorganized. I mean to, I really do, I just don’t follow through. You should see the pile of library books that are way overdue that are sitting on the table waiting so patiently to be returned.

Of course what I really wanted to say was:

Thanks for the fucking award, now I have to remember that I got the award, write a cute and wonderfully grateful post about the award which incidentally other bloggers will read and then think I actually like to get these damn awards thus causing me to get more and more of these horribly wicked things. Do you hate me?

But I would never say something like that.

So from now on I am going to donate all my blog awards to less fortunate bloggers.  Bloggers like Dooce and The Bloggess who aren’t getting nearly as much recognition and blog love as they deserve.

I was trying to get caught up on my commenting today and noticed that I can’t visit a lot of you because you aren’t registered with Disqus and therefore your blog link isn’t showing up when you comment.

I really want to visit you, so if you refuse to register with Disqus (even though it is free and it will totally make your blogging life so much simpler) could you please leave a link to your blog or most recent post for me so I can visit your site? I would really appreciate it. If you choose to leave a link I might need to moderate however that shouldn’t be an issue as long as you don’t have ‘penis’ or ‘Viagra’ in your URL.

If you read Momma Mia Culpa you know that Meleah has been Doing Things Differently (DTD) for a while now. If you don’t read Momma Mia Culpa then you better get over there and start reading because Meleah is an awesome writer and she has one of the greatest families.

Last week Meleah was told that she had to stop doing things differently for a while. This saddened Meleah because she has worked so hard, making small changes in the hopes that they will add up to big changes. Jennifer was also saddened to learn that Meleah must take a break from DTD.  Jennifer decided to pick up the DTD torch while Meleah is forced to do things the same (even though Jennifer is not really sure that Meleah is doing things the same since she has been doing things differently for quite some time now and that might just mean that indeed she is doing things differently if she has to go back to doing things the same) because she loves Meleah with all her heart, even though she has never actually met Meleah, she feels as if they should have been sisters and were probably separated at birth or something.  Jennifer can easily see the resemblance between herself and Meleah.

Jennifer signed up to DTD on Facebook a long time ago but Jennifer has been really busy so she never totally DTD. And by that she means that she forgot all about doing things differently and just continued to do them the same.

But not today. Jennifer is determined to DTD at least for the next 6 hours or so. Jennifer would really like to commit to more hours but Jennifer knows she has a really short attention span and it is probably not likely that she will be able to DTD for a whole entire day. Especially not on a Saturday when there are so ‘many’ things that need to be done the same (though, Jennifer wonders if she were to mix things up a bit by say cutting the grass while listening to music  when she doesn’t usually listen to music while cutting the grass, qualifies as DTD). Jennifer will be doing things differently by making sure all the children on the block play at another parent’s house so Jennifer doesn’t ‘lose it’. Jennifer will also not be picking up after said children. Jennifer realizes that she says this everyday and then caves in and picks up after the children because she can not stand to look at her living room when it is filled with 300 Barbies.  Jennifer is quite confident that she can stick to her guns today because she has locked the children out of the house before the 300 Barbies were let loose on the living room.

Jennifer is inviting all of you to do things differently too. Jennifer, nor Meleah, does not expect anyone to make drastic changes because they just don’t work. Jennifer invites you to try to make one small change today and build on that success. Jennifer also invites you to post about DTD on your blog so that Meleah doesn’t freak out because she can’t DTD for a while longer.

Jennifer is now going to put on her ‘outfit’ and go outside and walk around the block 6 times in a row for the first day in a row.

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Have you seen this? It’s popping up everywhere.

I am having way too much fun over at Tribal Blogs and my traffic has been going up ever since. I can’t believe we are now 147 strong and after only one month with no advertising.  All word of mouth.

It’s been great because people are Stumbling and Tweeting and Digging everyone else’s blog posts. Bloggers have been helping other bloggers solve problems and have been asking for advice. It’s been wild.

The reason for Tribal Blogs was to network with other bloggers and to increase traffic, using the toolbar and feed much like Entrecard does, except there aren’t all those crappy blogs that we all have to slog through. Each time I run the toolbar I visit great blogs, which I read because I don’t have to waste my time dropping cards on blogs I don’t like. Each day I am seeing more and more traffic from Tribal Blogs to my own blog. I get more hits from Tribal Blogs than I do from Entrecard which is fantastic because the people who visit by way of Tribal Blogs are actually reading what I have to say. My bounce rate has gone way down which is a really nice thing.

I didn’t expect to have so much fun. I’m not sure why, it’s not as if the members of Tribal Blogs aren’t all entertaining people, they really are. It’s just that you let loose a whole bunch of great bloggers and things start to get silly. Even the most serious topics are fun to read and respond to because we all have the same passion. We want more people to read our blogs and we will be damned if we don’t make that happen. I have met some of the most interesting bloggers on Tribal Blogs and I’m meeting new ones all the time. It never gets stale because someone is always recommending another great blog to read.

Yes, it has been an incredible amount of work and yes, I have created a lot of that work all by myself. What I mean is that I have messed things up by trying to be helpful. The Tribal Blogs IT guy warned me not to touch certain things. He specifically said not to install the update. I remembered for about week that I was not allowed to touch anything and then the memory of it was just gone. When I saw that there was an update available I said to myself:

“Ooh look, there’s a new update. I wonder if it doesn’t do really cool things”

I actually thought that as I was hitting the ‘update’ key.

And then everything crashed.

Joseph fixed everything, because he is an amazing and awesome geeky tech guy. He made me promise not to touch anything again and even suggested, strongly, that I write a little post-it note to myself and put it on my monitor. Which I have.

If you haven’t joined Tribal Blogs yet, what are you waiting for? Come on by, meet some new people, increase your blogs traffic and learn a few new tricks and tips from the pros.

Tribal Blogs is free to join, and if you want to have your blog featured in the toolbar (which everyone is using) and the feed page, you can become a premium member for a mere $6 per month. Pocket change. Come on over, we’re waiting for you!

Since launching Tribal Blogs two weeks ago we now have 79 members!

Woohoo!

Even better we have lowered the price from $12 to $6 per month for the premium membership. This means for $6 you get your blog loaded into the toolbar, your feed listed on the new feed page and access to private groups. The free membership is also available which gets access to most groups and forums as well as the free toolbar to surf a bunch of great sites easily.

One of the really popular, and free, groups is the Promote Me Please group. Members are going balls to the walls to promote other members using Stumble, Twitter, Digg, and any other promotional method. It’s been a lot of fun to watch everyone help each other out.

What has been even more interesting is that members are creating their own groups. Glenn, from Man Over Board created a mens only group, appropriately titled Men Only. I haven’t a clue what goes on in there, since I am not eligible for membership, but it sounds like they are having a lot of fun.  There is a lot of belching and farting going on but if that makes them happy…. Surprisingly there are just as men male bloggers who are members as there are female bloggers. This really surprised me since blogging seems to be such a female dominated activity. Who knew?

Another great group is the Leave a Penny, Take a Penny group. If you have an idea for a great post but it isn’t something your blog usually does you can leave the idea there for other members to use. If you are in need of ideas for posts you can look here to see what someone else has left.

I’m so pleased to see everyone contributing and helping their fellow bloggers especially since I have been so busy these past couple weeks. If you haven’t checked out Tribal Blogs yet, now is a great time to do so.

After weeks of burning the candle at both ends I hit the wall. Which sucks because I need at least another week before I can take any kind of time to myself.

I didn’t let that stop me yesterday however. I did nothing. I curled up on the couch and watched TV all day, between dozing on and off that is.

Most mornings, starting around 4am when the cat wakes me up, I have this narrative in my head about what the post of the day will be. I still have that but bringing myself to the computer to write it does not seem to be there. I have several posts that I want to write, and I will, but I need to get some stuff accomplished outside of the internet, outside of my house as a matter of fact.

I don’t want to do them. I don’t want to do anything.

But I will, I will get my mojo back. I’m not depressed, I’m just exhausted.