Do I write for humans?

I've got about five minutes right now to post something for you. I've just been writing a bunch of posts on my blogs, and it's pretty fun.

When we were in South Carolina, Paul's friend Jay told me that my blogs aren't actually for humans to read. (He's a computer programmer who knows these sorts of things.) He said the entire point of my job was to work in links that would make certain sites come up more often on a Google search.

At first I was pretty depressed about that. I wanted to quit. "If nobody's reading it, what's the point?" I asked myself. But it's actually kind of cool, and I'll explain why.

You see, if I'm writing for people to read, then the sites I'm representing will probably want me to push through certain agendas. They'll want me to, you know, peddle their products and try to make them sound good. But if it's all about numbers and no one from the sites reads them anyway, I feel absolutely no obligation to promote things that I don't believe in. It has kind of been an ethical issue for me from the beginning. I was supposed to build in links for "diet pills" and "weight loss supplements," but I don't believe in them! Most of them are scams that will actually hurt you more than help you, and I felt like I couldn't encourage people to buy them with a clear conscious. Now I'm not worrying about that at all, and I'm just writing it how I really believe it is. I'm no longer afraid to say, "It's pointless to take diet pills if you don't watch your lifestyle." I also talk about how people care too much about what others think-- why else would they invest in wrinkle creams? "What's so wrong with getting old? Why are we so ashamed of wrinkles? Shouldn't we honor the aged?"

I'm not a main stream kind of person, and I think our society has a lot of problems. Now I'm free to write about those problems all I want. This is turning out to be a great job for me after all! And despite what Jay said, I do get the occasional real comment. People like my no-bull-crap way of talking about the issues. They find it refreshing.