Time to blog about blogging.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a new blog related to sustainable living/better living in the suburbs. In researching some of the topics I discovered an entire genre of blogs about “minimalist lifestyle”. I dug into this area a bit and came upon notions like “lifestyle design”, “digital nomads”, etc.

The unifying theme of most of these ideas and blogs is that one can live in a “minimalist” way, foregoing many of the trappings of modern, consumerist American society, and effectively live a “location independent” lifestyle, gaining lots of leisure time, time to travel, etc.

I have looked at a lot of these blogs, and really, they all seem like digitial version of 1)self-help books or 2)a non-materialistic verson of those “get rich and live like a millionaire” infomercials you see on TV. Most of them are full of advice and encouragement, but not a lot in the way of actual “how to” information.

Now, that being said, I have seen some very good advice on a couple of them. I happen to agree with a lot the the “get rid of your stuff” mentality. I hate consumerism. I don’t think owning a home or car is necessary for one to have a good life. I encourage people to THINK about how they are living, and make changes when they want to. I am not slagging these bloggers at all, but I do find a lot of their post to be 1)reworded versions of their earlier posts or 2)fluff.

Enough about the content. Now I want to talk about the style of their blogging.

I have found that the style of these blogs, and in fact MANY blogs out there, fall into either of two categories.

• Blogs that contain great information, and make information the star of the show. These tend to be light on cool pictures of the author, and heavy on good info.
• Blogs that may contain great info, but regardless of whether they do or not, they tend to emphasize the author of the blog as kind of a blogging rock star. Lots of pictures of the author looking cool and happy, living the free lifestyle, beating the system.

It is my intention that my new blog be full of extremely useful info, rather than being like that second type. I don’t look cool enough to pull that off.