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Many norse/theutonic heathens, reconstructionist or not, at least dabble in the laying of the runes and countless other pagans, neo-pagans, new-age, or a little pagan flavored folk lay the runes as well.

Many of these folk are great and have a world of knowledge behind every laying of these ancient symbols, but one thing that bothers me is when these folk employ the blank rune.

Now, to understand why this bothers me you have to know two things.

-First, a little bit about me.
While I am an open minded person, perfectly capable to accept it when I've made mistakes and interested in new and better information as well as ways to do things, I am also a bit of a traditionalist.
Mostly it manifests as a "if it's not broken, why fix it" sort of thing, or an appreciation for "simpler things", but a part of it also manifests as a mild aversion to words being re-defined or things similar to that.

-The second thing you have to know is.
The blank rune and I are the same age.
That's right, the year that I was born, a man named Ralph Blum released a book called "Book of Runes". It was small, simple, easy to read, and it came with a set of ceramic rune tiles attached.
It quickly became popular and most books about the runes that have since followed have been based upon that piece of work.
This would be fine and dandy, if it weren't for a couple of problems.
First of all, the runes were rearranged and completely retranslated. No reference to former use of the runes was drawn upon.

How he managed to do this was this...
He obtained one set of runes complete with a spare disk. The spare disk was there to either replace a misplaced rune, or to serve as a foundation should he wish to carry a specific rune with himself for any purpose. It had, at the time he got the set, no more significance than that.
He then threw out the previous translation and the explanation of the ættir (families/groupings) of the runes into three times eight sets, and instead dumped out his set of 25 disks onto the floor and arranged them at random in a four by five grid.
It so happened that the spare disk ended up in the bottom right and Mannaz in the top left and due to that he was convinced there was a deep spiritual reason why they had arranged themselves that way leaving him further convinced that he didn't need to learn about the runes before teaching others about them.
He then used the I-Ching to craft brand new translations for them, more or less, and published his version of how to read the runes in the aforementioned book.

Before Blum got his hands on a set of runes there was no blank rune.
Not in the Elder Futhark.
Not in the Younger Futhark.
When writing in runes the words are separated by dots . or colons : not spaces so one can not even use "space" to point to where the blank rune comes in.

The blank rune is one of the clearest, most readily available symbol of how modern authors out to make a buck have taken old traditions, not just heathenry but many others, and bastardized them, sensationalized them, romanticized them, altered them, played with them, and disrespected them.
And the part that bothers me the most, is that people who wish to adopt these old ways have no tools to discern which piece of literature is a pile of nonsense, and which is an accurate representation of the tradition they wish to learn about.
Leaving us with a lot of folk who believe they are honoring a tradition going back thousands of years, while in fact they are following a modern, plasticised version of things that has little connection to the past, other than mere names.

I've long wondered if the inclusion of a blank rune was because 5s are significant in how people count in English whereas 12 was important for the Norse (that is why we don't say oneteen and twoteen but instead eleven and twelve; it's an artifact of an old numbering system).