In the most unexpected move of the past 2.5 years (!), my friend Raphaël has just launched his weblog Petit Bourgeois.

Convinced like The Register that weblogs were hurting the net, he had until now refused to launch his own, going to the length of closing his previous site when William Gibson stopped blogging last year… Now that blogs are everywhere (and that Gibson has started blogging again), he non-chalantly launches one. And to push the irony a little further, he starts by making a couple of posts in which he addresses us, his beloved 2-3 readers, and clarifies that we shouldn’t expect much from it, no film reviews, no personal stuff, nothing that could make this thing an enjoyable experience for himself firstly and his potential readership.
hum… Raph… c-h-i-l-l-l-l-l

My advices for starting a blog smoothly (in general):
- don’t talk to your readers, cos you don t have any yet.
- If you want to talk and engage a dialogue, don’t leave messages saying that you are sorry for not posting anything or changing anything on your blog for a few days… first, if you have no readers it looks funny and secondly, you should take it easy… nobody’s expecting you to post anything on a daily basis, do it at your own pace… We all know that sometimes people get busy… It sounds like I have been busy and you know my blog is not all in my life so I had to actually do some work…
- don’t say you’re not gonna post personal stuff and then moblog (OMG, you moblog too!! how fancy of you!) your friends…
- don’t dedicate ONE entire post to a single link to The Register. One can hardly forget their URL and they don’t need more Google Karma.
- make the top banner a link back to the front page.
- forget about trackbacks, they are useless, and an open door to potential spam.
- don’t leave comments open on all posts.
- be VERY ready for comment spam, as in, have some tools ready for when they’ll come. and they WILL come.
- provide a way to subscribe to comments so one can get emails when somebody replies to a comment.
- AND again! take it EASY, slowly, don’t set yourself barriers from the start cos it will be a long journey, you might drop it a few times, get busy more than expected, get bored, get famous, put Google ads etc…

Let’s enjoying buloggu! (would say people in Japan)