After being laid off from Microsoft, Keri Robinson of West Seattle started Lords and Ladies of Leisure, a blog that documents life after the pink slip.

They're not demonstrating, or rioting, or circulating petitons. For the young and unemployed, dealing with a crappy economy means blogging about it.

“We don’t go out and rally or anything like that,” said John Henion, a 32 year-old blogger. “We make fun of [expletive].”

Blogs about unemployment have cropped up like Internet startups in the 1990s.  Henion, who researched the jobless blogosphere before starting Unemploymentality in November, said most unemployment blogs were started between September 2008 and March 2009.

Already, they’re a cliché. Starting a blog is number 82 on Stuff Unemployed People Like a parody of the blog (and now, book) Stuff White People Like.

Stuff unemployed people like

Speaking by Skype from her Bay Area home office, SUPL’s founder, Grace, a 27 year-old former Internet business developer, said she wanted to recreate the routine she had at her old job, where she’d check her personal email and favorite blogs when she got in each morning.

Now, she writes a blog before settling in for a day of not working.

If all this is too meta for you, you probably already have a job, and  won’t  “get” Lords and Ladies of Leisure, Keri Robinson’s online homage to the pink-slip set.

LOL, as Robinson calls it, helped flip the script after she was laid off from her PR job at Microsoft in January.

 “There was the sense of dread,” the West Seattle woman said, “and when I started blogging this creative floodgate started opening.”

Planet jobless

Wendy Lin of Renton started  Planet Jobless to document her yoga teacher training. It ended up being catharsis for Lin, who had spent more than eight years at Iron Mountain, a data and records management company. She was laid off without warning in March.

“It was a huge shock and I never had a chance to ask questions and ask why,” Lin said.

Lady of leisure

Robinson still hasn’t found work but through LOL she’s found a purpose: to connect with other local folks on-line and in person.

She meets her readers weekly at C & P Coffee in West Seattle and also organizes regular happy hours and outings for fellow job-seekers.

“You’ve got to force socialization,” she said.

At first LOL was a way to explore potential work in social media, but now, Robinson said, she’s “in it now for the people and hanging out.”

Henion applauds this approach. He stays socialized  by walking his dog and meeting his Oakland, Calif. neighbors, and said he's skeptical the online space can offer the same kind of camaraderie and therapy as face-to-face interaction.

Crafty vs. crazy

What blogs like his can do, Henion said,  is identify and make light of “unemploymentality,” the altered mental state caused by job loss.
 
For example, a normal person looks to Craigslist for job leads. The unemployed person hatches a guerilla strategy, like corralling a potential employer in a casual carpool.

“You start thinking of crafty ways to thrive and survive,” Henion said.

There’s a fine line between crafty and crazy: “ If you have an unemploymentality long enough, I wonder if people would really want to be around you,” he said.

Not everyone is looking to make a statement. Some bloggers are just looking for exposure.

Laid-off loser

Chad Dryden sees his blog, Laid-off Loser, as a way to keep his writing skills sharp and build a reputation for freelance PR and writing work, as well as to amuse himself.

Dryden, a former entertainment reporter for The Idaho Statesman, picked the blog name because he thought it would attract a lot of Google hits.

“I though it was funny. I certainly don’t fancy myself a loser,” he said. 

Recession fatigue?

Henion believes the popularity of unemployment blogs is already waning.

“While we’re not at the tail end of the recession, I think we’re at the tail end of people’s interest in the recession,” he said.

Popularity in the blogosphere is a fleeting thing, Henion said;  “If our blog is getting traffic a year from now, I’d be surprised.”

In the meantime, Dryden doesn’t plan to blog as “laid-off loser” forever. When he’s fully employed he’ll pass the torch to a number job seeker, or put the blog on hiatus, he said, “because you never know when you’ll be laid off again.”