John Gruber writes about those annoying popups every website seems to have now and while he does a great job tearing into these ubiquitous, user-hostile patterns, one of the things that stood out to me about his piece was this meta commentary on blogging. Here’s John:

If you visit a website you should ... see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our fucking cookies” dickover to someone trying to read an article on the web makes no more sense than sending out an email newsletter that only contains a link to read the newsletter on a webpage. A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this.

It’s funny how often blogging feels like being the little child in the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes. You’re just stating what seems obvious to you.

I often look at my own posts and think, “There’s nothing novel, or important, or deep in here at all — is this even worth saying?”

A post’s point can seem so glaringly obvious to me (and thus, I presume, others) it feels like a waste of time to even say it. As John says:

A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this.

But then real-world examples of annoyance pile up around you and nobody talks about it, so you finally just have to say it in a post and bring receipts.

You feel like someone gone mad: “Is anyone else seeing the same thing I’m seeing? And we’re just ok with this?”

Very often, those are the best posts I read from others.

So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it.

Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!”