This is not a blog

I know what you’re thinking. Just what the world needs — another blog.

Good thing this isn’t a blog, least not in the conventional sense. Sure, it may look like one, considering that it’s a personal journal published on the Web.

But it is not a blog the way most of us have come to think of one.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Renee.

Looking for lots of attitude? A callous disregard for the rules of grammar and spelling? A fascination with the mundane (“What I ate for breakfast this morning”)?

Not here.

I started Ellipses because I’ve been posting my personal reflections online since 1996, and have launched a dozen or so Web sites and blogs (yes, call them that if you have to). And I am troubled by this whole blogging phenomenon.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t like what bloggers have done for to the personal Web journal genre. They’ve ruined it — turned it into something self-serving, overly introspective and for the most part, silly.

Blogs are becoming irrelevant.

Ellipses is, for lack of a better term, the anti-blog. Where other personal journals are self-serving, it will be self-effacing; where they are introspective, it will be inclusive; where they are silly, it will exercise good sense.

Why call it Ellipses? Because the ellipsis — the dot-dot-dots in a sentence — denotes the omission of words. Often, these phrases are thought to be superfluous, so they’re edited out. But the film left on the cutting room floor can be fascinating (consider how well the “director’s cut” of your favorite film sold).

It’s a nice play on my last name, too.

Ellipses will explore the “dark matter” between the issues that I cover as a journalist and the stories I interact with (more about me in a future post). It asks the questions that no one else can — or will. Hopefully, that will make for compelling reading. And if it doesn’t, well, please go start your own blog and show me how it’s done.

Or better yet, start your own anti-blog.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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