Blog mentors

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My close personal friend Beav pointed out an interesting piece today at BlogHer about mentoring and blogging.

Have you ever seen that “Seinfeld” episode where the woman feels she needs a mentor to give her guidance in life and no one in the Seinfeld universe can wrap his/her head around the fact? Consider me a friend of Seinfeld; I don’t get it. I especially don’t get why someone would need a blogging mentor.

I’ll skip over the “women helping women” aspect. I think it’s sexist to assume that only women would be interested in either mentoring or being mentored but it’s BlogHer and BlogHer is female-centric and it’s probably not meant as an intentional slight. Some women are just more comfortable with other women.

I wrote an article for TC in May of 2004 about how to get started blogging. Naturally it was geared more toward the writer who wants to blog but anyone could have started blogging from the info in the article. I wrote about how to get started, what you can blog about, how to use your blog, etc. Nowhere did I suggest that you needed someone to hold your hand and guide you through a paragraph on your recent excursion to Target.

Here’s what BlogHer wants you to do: read the available mentors’ blogs. E-mail the bloggers 3-5 questions you want them to answer. Suggest 3 day/time combinations where you can chat on the phone w/ your chosen mentor. Then you call the mentor at the agreed-upon time and you chit chat about blogging.

Why don’t they do this in their blogs? Why don’t the blogger/mentors say, “Hey, I’m opening up to questions about blogging. Let’s all share our answers and opinions and learn together” eh? I suppose the answer is that someone wants to feel special by the one-on-one interaction (student or mentor, maybe both). I have a strong feeling it’s more about “I could be [insert blogger's name here]’s friend! I could talk to her on the phone!”

Maybe I’m just too independent for this kind of thing and, like the Seinfeld characters, I can’t wrap my head around the fact that someone feels she needs to be mentored, much less on blogging.

I mean, have you seen some of the weblogs that exist? ClubMom pays people who can’t be bothered to write using capital letters. iVillage pays a woman blogging as “Funny Mom” who writes things like “[Paris Hilton] needs to disappear and quick. Aren’t there any serial killers out there who predate upon super rich, boring, untalented hotel heiresses?” and “Apparently, little girls should only be using the colors [of crayons] that represent the bruises they will be receiving from their future husbands” (that’s about a Disney Princess Art Set that her daughter got for Christmas). I mean, if these people can be paid for blogging then certainly you can get through writing a post a week about your cat or the weather or what celebrities you would have sex with (see yesterday’s post).

If the mentoring thing is for women who want to be paid bloggers… well, really. Apply to join a collective that’s already paying (Stroller Derby was looking last I heard, which was around the 19th or so). Or sign up for Google AdSense. Or here’s a thought: you can just blog for the satisfaction it brings you.

If you think you’re going to get rich off of writing, think again. Write b/c you love to write. If you can get some dough from it, fantastic. If not, you can get rich on passion instead. If you’re not passionate, well, I’ll mentor you.

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