No, not at all! I'm actually studying advertising right now, and am a big proponent of learning to use marketing. The difference between my perspective and your

No, not at all! I'm actually studying advertising right now, and am a big proponent of learning to use marketing. The difference between my perspective and yours (in my opinion, of course — feel free to contradict!) is that you see marketing as a wholly advantageous thing, whereas I'm more wary — I see it as an easily abused drug which provides a shallow relief to a deeper problem. Here's how I'd put it. When I recommend a blog to somebody, or to myself, it's never because of the factors that make a blog bloggy: RSS feeds, archives, pagination, etc. The really important thing about a person's blog is the person, and the traits that person embodies. The blog is simply the way that person delivers herself to me. Ditto Twitter: The medium doesn't make the man, the man defines the medium. Bad Twitters are atrocious. Ditto bad blogs. You see "value" in these various marketing positions, as if the problem is "does not market well". I think the problem is somewhat more multifaceted than that. Part of the problem is that people use tools they cannot competently handle; while I suspect that your post won't be popular enough to, say, motivate a man to suddenly try and get speaking roles, I imagine that a man who sucks at writing and at speaking and at being interesting who suddenly decided to present at a conference might find your advice more traumatic than useful. A similar presentation that uses the same facts you do but shifts its perspective somewhat might sound more like this: "Here are some tools you have to express yourself. These are the ways that people use them; this is why they use this one instead of that one; here are some instances of good behavior with this tool that might inspire you." Perhaps you then explain why expression might be good for people, might get them work/recognition/whatever. By phrasing it that way you get to a core issue — what's the point of using these tools specifically? — and also move away from suggesting things like, "if you are not happy then it's probably that you're not using these tools", which is frequently wrong and occasionally harmful. I'm on your side here. I just think you presented your thoughts in a somewhat problematic way. Hopefully there's some ideas worth turning over in our discussion here that lead to future ideas. :-)