“If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.” –Victor Hugo
The Russell Shaw entry What’s wrong with Zip Realty?, written in February, was the most clicked-upon post on BloodhoundBlog on Tuesday. Debunking Zillow.com, which was written last July and which often comes in first, took second place.
I’m making note of this because there is a celebration of mental indolence going on just now, reflexively offered up as the rationale and justification for mental indolence. This by itself is meaningless: Erg for erg, laziness is the hardest job there is.
But it occurred to me that the RE.net has undertaken efforts, formal and informal, to instruct novices in the art of real estate weblogging — and laziness is very bad weblogging advice.
The job is what it is. It takes what it takes. If you don’t feel up to taking on the world, that’s fine. But don’t affect to pretend to believe that goofy pictures and bold subheads can take the place of rational discourse. It is actually possible to destroy a specious pose with one onomatopoeical word, but, most often, the work of the mind requires a greater effort.
This matters because you are not writing solely for the day and the visitors thereof. If there is any importance at all to the work that you do, it will be linked and searched. The post that gets only nine hard clicks today may someday get ninety clicks every day — if it deserves them.
What you do is your business, and most of weblogging is ephemeral — of moment for substantially less than a moment. We work the way we do here because we don’t affect to admire the half-assed. If you choose instead to indulge your worst appetites, arguing that that this is the path to popularity among people seeking to indulge their own worst appetites — rave on. It means less than nothing. The work of the mind in real estate will go on — in links, in searches, in perpetuity — without you.
But: If you actually care about improving your own mind Read more
BloodhoundBlog is eleven months’ old today. We’re whipping up the batter for a first-birthday cake that — I assure you — Odysseus will be more than happy to eat.
