Thanks to Geeklawyer for pointing out the truly dreadful ‘blog‘ by Watson Farley & Williams, an international legal firm. As he says, it wouldn’t have taken them long to find someone to help them understand what this blog malarky is all about, but instead they’ve gone the FIUY (fuck it up yourself) route and have ended up with something truly atrocious.

Let’s have a quick look at what they did wrong.

a) The blog entries are PDFs. What on earth do they think they are doing? Why use a PDF? Blog entries are supposed to be easy to read in your browser at the click of a button, they shouldn’t involved downloading anything at all, let alone a PDF.

b) The blog entries are dire. The company has asked the trainees to blog, but obviously hasn’t helped them understand what blogs are, what might be good to write about, or how best to write it. Instead of an insight into life in a law firm, you get trite nonsense: “Oh it’s so great top work here… And look! Free booze!” I’m not going to pick on the trainees individually though – it’s not their fault they’ve been asked to do this and given no proper help or direction.

c) No comments.

d) No trackbacks.

e) No archives.

f) No blogroll.

g) No RSS.

h) No links to other blogs.

i) The blog entries are PDFs. Ok, I know I said that once already, but I really can’t get over it. PDFs. For the blog entries. WTF?

In fact, this ‘blog’ has absolutely none of the technology that makes a blog a blog. This is not a blog. It’s is a collection of poorly written PDF articles. Where’s the openness? The transparency? The honesty? The interest? The passion? If I wrote a blog about watching paint dry it’d have more passion than this one, and it’d be a lot more interesting.

Now I’m not the only blog consultant in town, but frankly you don’t need to be a blog consultant to see just how dreadful this attempt at latching on to a ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ phenomenon is. Ask any blogger what makes a blog a blog and they’ll probably give you a list much the same as above, but obviously Watson Farley & Williams are quite happy spouting bullshit and following trends from a safe distance of several hundred light years.

I wonder if they’ll do a L’Oreal (fix it) or a Juicy Fruit (pull it and pretend it never happened)?