The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.

The world of business and corporations and networking and conference calls and Six Sigma and Someone Stole My Cheese and marketing-speak and power suits is utterly beyond me. It's all so much nonsense. Which is kind of a shame, really, because I'd probably be making a lot more money if things like "branding," "market share," and "competitive intell" meant anything at all to me.

But Dot Com Mom gets it in spades. And she writes about it. Lucky me.

Blogger has, I'm guessing, something like 10 standard templates available for the 36 million (roughly) bloggers using its platform. Each of them are tired, boring, and barely functional not to mention generally ugly. Do you really identify yourself so much with the sea and nautical life that you'd use their lighthouse template to represent who you are? I know one person who can reasonably get away with this, and you aren't that person.

Look, people: a blog is, if nothing else, an expression of self (or at least it damn well should be). Sure, for us it's about the writing, and good writing is more likely to make me disregard the trappings of your blog. You can wrap a pile of dog shit up in pretty bows and lovely paper, but it's still a pile of dog shit. But if you wrap a pile of gold in used diapers, I'm not going to go digging for the gold. Appearance and accessibility matter.

That said, your blog could be gorgeous and cleverly formatted and easily navigated, but if you don't post consistently you're just taking up space. Allison's got a grand total of 18 posts. Two of them from 2003. And she hasn't written since March. This is a colossal waste of my time.

Not surprisingly there's no About page, and Allison's Blogger profile gives nothing away. So I don't know why I should listen to a thing she has to say, there's no impetus for me to be curious about her because she likes something I like or hates something I like or mentions something personally intriguing. There's nothing personal here. It's a small collection of self-important essays on politics, technology, and lord knows what all else because it's so heavily couched in tech and marketing and management terms that it loses all meaning for me.

Allison makes you work for it, and even the good stuff can be an ungodly chore to get through, with explanatory links and marginally obscure references overshadowing really quite fine writing. I didn't care enough to click on those external links. I mean, do we really need a link to a definition of "smart cookie"? No, no we don't. Those links are distracting instead of helpful; they just direct us away from your writing, which is (or could be) really rather good. I'm not denying the very real intelligence Allison displays, but it's off-puttingly lacquered with excess information while being unsettlingly devoid of heart.

I could go through and list my constructive criticism now, but I honestly can't be bothered to expend the energy for someone who hasn't updated since March and managed to eke out a dozen posts this year. Get back to me when you've decided to be a blogger.