Blogger Doesn't Love Us and Neither Does the Buffalo News

I'm sure I've probably noted this before, and as much as I hate repeating myself, why, oh why can't we get a little love from the Blogger "Blogs We've Noticed" people?

I don't mean sexual love, as we're all happily married here at DOUI (Though not to each other, I hasten to add.) I more or less mean the kind of love network television gives a company when one of its products inexplicably turns up in a popular situation comedy, or the kind of love that shows like Saturday Night Live give "artists" like Ashlee Simpson and Brittney Spears when they invite them to perform instead of throwing rotten fruit at them and introducing them as "That popular no-talent screecher of banal overproduced crap."

I realise that out blog design is relatively similar to one of the base designs Blogger uses for beginners, but you try finding a background and template that says "Dictionary" like this one. Still, plenty of the blogs identified as "noticeable" use standard templates, including the ever-popular basic, "I was too tired to bother" white layout, prominently featured on the incredibly, inevitably, and unavoidably noticeable (DOUI sarcasm overload warning) Teare Software Soultions.

Take for another example a currently "noticed" blog, The Fanatic Cook. What's so bloody fanatical about a large picture of ginger root and a few niche articles? A really fanatical cook would be completely out of his gourd, like Gordon "I'll $#%&ing slide tackle you if you mix the salad in the same bowl twice you *^%#-er!!" Ramsay, or this disturbing bloke. A complete fanatic of a cook would be Emeril if he blended with an aeroplane propeller.

No, it's pure petulance that can scan the few million blogs that make up the Blogosphere and lazily drift by a blog that details Peter Graves new career as a expert consultant for George Romero's films, Ben Affleck's peculiar sense of humour, our dazzling public relations campaign for New Jersey, an interview with a massive crustacean (Oops, sorry... I mean this one!) or pretty much any crazy thing Nuffy has posted in the last 3 months. For example.

So, I'm already depressed a bit about Blogger's loathing of our otherwise cheerful and perky site, when I read that Greg Connors of The Buffalo News (Motto: All the News That's Fit to Buffalo) has produced a list of his selection of best Group Blogs, and not only are we not on it, but all my sources indicate that Mr. Connors doesn't even know we exist and refers anything with the words "Unfortunate Ideas" in it to the Buffalo News' Lemony Snicket desk, which has a staff of over 45 people.

This is of course, an outrage.

Please allow me to rephrase that for effect: THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!!!!!!!!!!

The Lemony Snicket desk deserves at least 50 staff on it.

Thanks for that.

I'm not sure where Mr. Connors (If that is his real name) gets off declaring himself an expert in group blogs or a journalist for the Buffalo News (Update: OK - Apparently he really is a journalist for the Buffalo News. I'm completely off-base on that one), but I think he should have done a little more research into the whole group blog thing before dimissing us along with the hell of blogs like Diet Discount Supplements, Blogging Along 2006, and CY-BAR, the last of which admittedly reminds me of Zimpter's posts in that there are so few of them.

No, Mr. Conners needs to know just exactly who The Dictionary of Unfortunate Ideas really is before dismissing us as a bunch of lunatic, short-tempered, insulting cranks.

Erm... Actually, upon reflection, that was how I described us to Stew at lunch today. Nonetheless, Mr. Conners and the myopic, gastronomique-biased, "noticers" at Google need to visit our site to see what real fanaticism looks like.

And we need you to tell them.

Unfortunately, no one seems to have an e-mail address on their pages these days. Hmmm...isn't that suspicious.