Backseat bloggers

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One recreational hazard of being a blogger is the existence of a group people that I like to refer to as the backseat bloggers.

These are generally friends, colleagues or family members that you know in “real” life and who, being fully aware that you write a blog, insist on pointing at every mundane thing that passes their eyes whilst in your presence with the words “Hey! You should put that on your blog!”

I seem particularly prone to this phenomenon as I’m additionally known as someone who takes photographs of various scenes or objects that amuse me.

So, for example, I could be in a restaurant and as the waiter brings over my meal my companion will suddenly interject with “Hey, you should take a photo of your food and put it on your blog!”

Now whilst it’d be very easy to answer all such prompts with the reflective counter “Why?!” politeness often leads me instead to say things like “Yeah, heh! Maybe.”

I remember Billy Connolly commenting on what it was like for him being a stand-up comedian. He’d be in a pub somewhere and a total stranger would walk up to him, insist on telling him a really awful joke and finish with the words “You can put that one in your act if you like.”

I assume that I’m not alone in this and that there are other bloggers out there nodding their heads as they read this, also being prone to bombardment with inane observations and demands to publicise the banal from the non-blogging public.

Perhaps this behaviour is actually a precursor to a person starting their own blog. Motivated out of a feeling of rejection when bloggers don’t see the need to take them up on their suggestions to broadcast the eccentricities that they spot in life, such a disenchanted individual eventually takes their own tentative steps into the blogging community.

Maybe in my own non-blogging days I too was guilty of highlighting the unnecessary to anyone I thought could carry my observations on to a wider audience.

I’ve recently decided that the best way to deal with the desire of others to blog through me is to try and coax them into the blogosphere themselves.

Such that the next person who wishes to point at a slightly battered can of Coke in a newsagents and chuckle to himself whilst telling me to “put it on” my blog, I’ll resolve to tell them “No, lets put it on your blog. I’ll even help you make one!”

So if you have any backseat blogger friends out there why not help them take such a step and invite them into the[ir own] front-seat? Turn a bug-a-boo into a blogger too!

Actually, at this point I should probably make the disclaimer to anyone that I know and who reads this that I was not referring to you or your particular observations whilst writing this. They were in fact very astute and had not forgetfulness impaired my progress I would surely have put them up for you. I am in fact referring to other people that I know who, like you, also request I “put it on my blog” however their observations are decidedly less interesting and insightful than yours.

Hopefully now I’ve managed to salvage a few friends with these final words.

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