The Pisstakers have been going a few months now, and after faffing around looking for sites and forums full of like-minded souls, we recently signed up to MyBlogLog. It was divine intervention, finding a star that shines bright in the dark on-line directory-laden skies. We have seen the light, learning the true meaning of a blogging community.

Not smoke and mirrors

Most times you join a community you get a message saying, "Hi" and that is it. Persistent webmasters set the autoresponder to once a month and keep in touch that way. Others suddenly change name and become your latest Viagra representative. Another webmaster named Tom, tries to persuade you that you are his friend, along with 127 million others. Right!

But MyBlogLog is better than that. Although we don't exchange Christmas cards or spend hours round each others' houses drinking and joking, there is a certain camaraderie and feeling that hey, these people are real and actually seem genuine. Maybe I am deluded and they just want to tag along to benefit from our zillions of visitors, but we aren't totally cynical and say thanks for the welcome and the banter.

Reciprocal links lunacy

We have learnt a lot from our time perusing other blogs - but not all good! If you can blog, you can write. That has to be a safe assumption, right? But few bloggers really write, and especially when it comes to link building, they limit their thinking to copy-and-pasting links, or auto blogroll generator codes or nothing at all.

To our mind there is nothing wrong with a few links on display. In fact, a few well-selected links lends credibility to those in the list. You know the webmaster has put a little bit of thought into who is and isn't worth some honorable mention. But screw being a part of those humungous lists of links in sidebars. They are madness, laziness and an abuse of sidebar real estate. Rather than honor our mates in the form of a little link in a long list, we want our mates to be acknowledged properly.

Blog posts on bloggers

We are going to reinvent, in fact, smash to pieces, the blogroll concept. Any honorable link to great sites will go into an article - a sea of relevant pisstaker text. A much better feeling, we believe, to be read once and lost in the archives, than be portrayed forever in a prominent position in a meaningless column.

Perhaps the Page rank perfectionists will roll their eyes and counsel a different route, but you know what, there is more to life than PR6. There is PR0 and 20% month on month traffic growth from everywhere but Google. Yee hah! It's a social network world out there now, where solid relationships with others count more than willy nilly links to others. We are just ahead of the curve where, in 2009, Googletube will also be with Googlefriendz and GoogleSpace. Search will stay important, of course, but will be done in ways not even The Pisstakers can conceive.

Pisstakers go social

Over the holiday period we will, therefore, be writing up a few tributes. Obviously we don't know anyone personally, and only have on-line evidence to go on, and we are Pisstakers, so there is a chance we may say the wrong thing, (correction - at some point we will definitely say the wrong thing!) but that is the chance us risky edgy avant garde bloggers take, innit!

Pisstakers are sometimes anti-social

As a tip to writers, we sketch out a serious story outline, mentally note all the words we can twist and concepts we can alter slightly and then write it up. Occasionally we get sidetracked and forget to edit it all, and publish articles that don't quite convey our intended meaning.

For instance, Webby, a Web 2.0 site owner was featured on The Pisstakers and we wrote dumb bastard. Far from doubting his parentage, we were pissed at ourselves after reading through what we published, because we lost a "clever point" for not twisting dumb into DOM, as intended at the first outline stage. So poor editing is always a shortcoming we try to eradicate so, we self regulate and correct ourselves when we are wrong - which is better than buckling under threats.

Here is wishing well to all current bloggers everywhere and take a look at our blogging review section. If you want to be featured, drop us al line.

2007 Year of the dog eat dog!

And to the tens of millions of blogs due to launch next year, be warned, the competition is heating up. The Pisstakers have a new theme coming, lures for guest writers and way too many ideas to list here. ie we are going to kick some serious ass in the mad world of funny web, tech and news blogs.
So, if you are debating entering blog land in 2007, consider the wise words of a real editor friend of mine who once said,

If you have nothing new to say, shut (the fuck) up.