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Yeah, Dude. Like, something.

Should Bad Managers adopt a 'stream of consciousness' style front page?

The advantages are many: updates suddenly become very easy, because I can just 'bash out' whatever happens to be on my mind at the time, rant about something or other that happened to me in the last few days, and then pass it off as a 'site update'.

The disadvantage, of course, is that the site loses its sharply focussed edge (you mean it had one?) and becomes just like the other 10,000,000 home pages out there that are masquerading as up to the minute lifestyle-driven 'cyber-culcha' websites.

Oh, to be taunted by such a haunting dilemma...

Another problem, I guess, is that most of those sites paint the owner as somone who lives and breathes the Web, regularly uses IRC, does drugs, and regularly attends all-night raves exclusive to similar greasy cyber-dudes. They do this simply by describing the site owner's recent activities over the last few days, or by posting messages such as "Sorry this is the first update for six months, but I've been like really livin' it up man!"

Contrarily, my own regular update would seem remarkably contrived, as if I'm trying desperately to appear to be something I'm not. If I took an honest approach, a typical update would be along these lines:

"Last night my brother and his wife came over for dinner. They brought their in-laws, and I showed them my new BMW. Last week I mowed the lawn. Hey, time for a cup of tea!"

I think you get the point. I don't think it translates too well to a wired-geek lifestyle rant, especially not if it needs to be updated at least every week. Talk about a law of diminishing returns. "This week, mowed the lawn again... dum de dum..."

Of course, that isn't what Bad Managers is about anyway. Thank God. If I bothered to conduct a survey of the site's readers, and if any of the site's typically silent lurkers bothered to respond, then I would probably find that the site is read mostly by a mixture of business programmers and project managers, i.e. people who couldn't care less whether my net-handle is Neo and that I have a Nokia phone just like Keanu Reeves', or that I spend every waking hour playing Max Payne (luckily none of that is true).

Actually, that's got me wondering. Just who are all you people? When you read the stories on this site, do you empathise with them or do you laugh at the fact that those sort of things never seem to happen to you? I just ask because not many people seem to send in their own stories, which is a pity. La la la.

Anyway there you go, there's my one and only random stream of consciousness ever. Introspection roolz!



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