Labeled with Love?

I suspect traditional journalism is the culprit, but the need to label everybody seems to have crept into blogging and internet marketing while I was looking the other way. I was wading my way through my reader the other day, and started off with a post from one of my favorite writers. She was banging on about “Boomers” and “Generation Y.” Or was it “X".” Then I moved onto another who referred to “Low value Twitter followers” whatever they are, so at that point I gave up and decided to check email.

That proved to be a mistake, because the first email I read labeled a colleague a “Guru” and the next one (written about the same guy) called him an “Authority Blogger.” So I moved on from email as well!

I know that these are descriptive adjectives, and they can sometimes help us to pigeonhole people, or to understand their credentials, but I hope we don’t end up going the way of newspapers or we’ll have some of those ludicrous sentences like “27 year old African American single mother of two, Samantha Jones……..”

On the other hand, I do suppose that “Devastatingly handsome boomer blogger Mike CJ…..” sort of does have a ring about it. The trouble is, I don’t know if I’m a boomer or generation Y, so maybe someone can explain the difference to me. Actually, don’t worry, I’m not sure I care, just Mike will do, who needs labels anyway?

Maybe have a look at:

1/ It’s how you say it, not what you say

2/ Sales pages don’t work!

3/ I am Web 2.0