The Glitzy World of Blogging, Online STDs and Minkie’s Bum

Waily waily, whatever shall I do? The call of fame, fortune, loose women and celebrity gambling is calling me, yet how much of myself am I willing to sacrifice to become a stumbling part of this A-list parade?

Seeing as how this blog has now been (relatively) functional for close to a year, I figure that my celebrity status is but a few scant months in my future.

I can smell the Crystal and Caviar from here.

Don’t forget the hookers.

Being the unforgivable blogging n00b that I still am, finding my footing took a while. I’m embarrassed to admit how long it took me to work out how to attach a Twitter and Facebook link to each post (an effort that I am almost positive permanently corrupted my blog’s code).

To coin a phrase; I’ve been going about this like a very nervous bull in a china shop trying really hard not to break anything. ‘Trial and Error’ has been the name of the game, as I copy, paste, cut and load my way towards social godhood, using my template’s code like a cork board and my refresh button like a bottomless bottle of digital correction fluid.

By way of this Gonzo Blogging, my site has gone through more personality changes than a VH1 Madonna flashback. From the rhetoric flinging art/advertising student to the wannabe cartoonist to the cynical bitch-er to the 'Brett-this-is-your-final-warning-if-we-catch-you-reading-Cracked-one-more-time-at-work-we’re-firing-your-ass' rip-off, it’s taken me a while to really find a voice. 

Then I found this watch and wallet full of money.

The real issue now is; how much of that voice do I use?


I understand the need to drive traffic to one’s site. If I’ve done my research correctly, you get one photograph with Minkie van der Westhuisen at a social event per every 200 daily hits, and a clip of her in the bathtub when you crack one thousand. 

Just another perk of the internet.

But how much of one’s creativity should one be willing to sacrifice for that glimpse of sudsy buttocks? I understand the need and demand for entertainment blogs, but it seems as though every second successful blog you come across these days is sharing its links with the rest of the internet like mildly amusing, binary STDs. Social memes and celebrity updates are a bandwagon that the vast majority of bloggers have leapt on to drive traffic towards their pages. A You Tube link and a quick blurb will jump you up a hundred places on SA Top Blogs in a matter of hours, while a stolen link from a celebrity homepage, an international glitz magazine or, horror upon horrors, a celebrity tweet, will get you invited to John Frusciante’s next tea and mescaline party. 

“I write the internet.”

Social trending and, a personal pet peeve, the world of popular design, are also heavily to blame. I realize than I have a tendency to hipster-bash, but fuck me, if those flannel wearing wombats could keep their post-adolescent harping from leaking out of the shabby-chic time-capsules they call their brains and all over my internet for just one day, I’d be a much happier man.


I imagine that there are a few bloggers who manage to post regularly, creatively, and still maintain a nine-to-five, but I, unfortunately, am not one of those people. This blog is written exclusively in the morning or over lunch, those times when I’m either not allowed to or am incapable of drinking.


I have all the respect in the world for blogs like Bangers and Nash, Running Wolf’s Rant and (although not necessarily my cup of tea) Cape Town Girl. These guys manage to maintain their originality without overtly chumming the internet waters with eighty word ‘blurb’ posts and the disjointed jetsam of Charlie Sheen’s brain. And they’re local! The days of relying on international, internet humour-professionals for my daily browsing amusement are over (according o this morning’s issue of Heat). 

Also, Britney got ugly.

This all may sound irritably naive of me, but to put it into context; I only discovered what Two Ocean’s Vibe was in 2009. I began following a blog for the first time no more than eighteen months ago. Until this minor but important foray into the world of blogging, I believed that the internet existed solely for people to steal music from Lars Ulrich while sharing badly illustrated cartoons of humanoid marsupials doing each other.

No, you don’t get a pic.

Is there a point to this rant? I may have forgotten. I think that it had something to do with whether or not I should stoop to the level of blog poaching. Sure, there are some amazing sites out there that I think everyone should read (Cracked and Subnormality, to name but two) but does that give me the right to use their hard work to drive traffic to my blog? I don’t think so. I think all you dedicated readers out there (you three know who I’m talking about) are just going to have to put up with the two to three week gaps between posts.


Because no-one deserves a prize for perusing Stumble Upon.

48 straight hours of LOL Cat surfing is prize enough.