Dreck

In his 1890 novel The Light That Failed, Rudyard Kipling wrote, “Four–fifths of everybody's work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake.”

In the 1950s, science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon said, “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” That phrase has become known as Sturgeon’s Law.

In a 2013 article in the National Post, journalist Clive Thompson described blogging, Facebooking, Twittering, and similar self-published thoughts as “an ocean of dreck, dotted sporadically by islands of genius.”

As my long-time readers know, I’m not one to hold back the dreck. As a blogger, you never know when you’ll pop out an island of genius. Still, genius is a very high bar to aim for. It would be fantastic if some of my blog posts could be described as genius, but that possibility seems unlikely. I will aim for captivating, spellbinding, or riveting, but I’ll be happy with interesting, thought-provoking, or readable.

When it comes to dreck, I like to think this blog is, at the least, the cream of the dreck. And on some days it might be, if not an island of genius, a small lifeboat on that ocean.

Writing a blog is like panning for gold. You have to create a lot of dreck to get to the occasional nugget.

How much dreck is created every day? Clive Thompson says if you count emails, tweets, blog posts, Facebook comments, and text messages, the total comes to at least 3.6 trillion words, the equivalent of 36 million books every day. That is more books than the Library of Congress holds.

Frankly, I would not count all those things as content. But consider blog posts alone. According to torquemag.io, there are 1.5 million blog posts published each day on the Wordpress network, and that doesn’t count the sites for which Wordpress cannot collect statistics. According to builtwith.com, Wordpress is used on about 47% of websites that use a content management system. It’s safe to say at least three million blog posts are published daily.

That is a lot of dreck. I have a lot of competition. Fortunately, I also have a lot of experience – I’ve been writing dreck since I was a kid. My readers should know that when it comes to dreck, they can count on me. I won’t let them down. Best dreck on the Web!