{"id":620,"date":"2007-06-15T23:09:40","date_gmt":"2007-06-16T03:09:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/15\/what-i-know-about-blogging\/"},"modified":"2007-06-16T23:43:06","modified_gmt":"2007-06-17T03:43:06","slug":"what-i-know-about-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/15\/what-i-know-about-blogging\/","title":{"rendered":"What I know about blogging"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My mentor from the Columbia program, <a href=http:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/jonwill>Jon Williams<\/a>, recently <A href=http:\/\/newyorkcto.blogspot.com\/>started a blog<\/a>, and asked me if I had any advice about blogging.  That got me thinking about what makes for a good blog, so I&#8217;m sharing my thoughts here.<\/p>\n<p>The blogosphere is intensely competitive in terms of the <a href=http:\/\/www.firstmonday.org\/issues\/issue2_4\/goldhaber\/>attention economy<\/a>.  When <a href=http:\/\/rpc.bloglines.com\/blogroll?html=1&#038;id=nehrlich>blogs I read<\/a> link to other blogs, I&#8217;ll bring the new blog up in a tab and read half a post.  If that snippet doesn&#8217;t interest me, I&#8217;ll leave and never come back.  If I actually finish reading the post, I&#8217;ll click on a couple other recent posts to see if they can write on more than one topic, and then if it&#8217;s promising, I&#8217;ll add it to my RSS feed.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, a blog has at most 30 seconds to convince me that it&#8217;s worth my time.   And my experience generalizes.  According to Google Analytics, the average visitor to my blog from a search engine spends about 30 seconds before leaving.  That&#8217;s not much time, especially when it&#8217;s impossible to precisely control the visitor&#8217;s experience, because search engines may deposit them on any page.  That&#8217;s why every page here has the sidebar that introduces me and links to recent and random posts, so visitors can have a sampling of what this blog is about no matter where they arrive.<\/p>\n<p>What does a blog have to do to capture my attention?  <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It has to be well-written.  That may seem obvious, but there are plenty of bad writers out there.  One of the hardest parts of writing for the Internet is learning to edit before publishing rather than posting stream-of-consciousness ramblings.  Since there&#8217;s no editorial process, we have to do our own filtering to avoid such writers rather than relying on a gatekeeper like the editors of the New Yorker.\n<li>It has to talk about something of interest to me.  I won&#8217;t read a blog about knitting, no matter how well-written it is.\n<li>Blogs I like tend to have a focus.  They&#8217;re not for everybody, but they appeal to their core audience.  <a href=http:\/\/headrush.typepad.com\/>Creating Passionate Users<\/a> or <a href=http:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com>Joel on Software<\/a> make it clear from their titles what their focus is.  It&#8217;s related to the process of <A href=http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2007\/04\/10\/the-guy-theory\/>becoming &#8220;The Guy&#8221;<\/a> &#8211; having a focus makes it much easier to become _the_ reference on that topic.  The first question I asked Jon was to articulate why he was blogging (his answer is in his sidebar).  That focus will make it easier for him to determine what is appropriate for the blog and what isn&#8217;t, what should be cut in editing and what should be left in.\n<li>It has to be authentic.  If the writing shows no soul or personality, I&#8217;m gone.  I have to feel like I know the person from reading that first half-post.  This doesn&#8217;t mean <a href=http:\/\/www.trizle.com\/trizoko\/>over-using slang<\/a>, but making it clear that the author has a point of view and is sharing it with you via their writing.  I need to be interested in learning more about how they see the world.\n<li>At the same time, the blog has to be more than just a vehicle for self-expression.  In many cases, the blog is a way for the blogger to share their experiences with friends and family.  That&#8217;s great, and the reason why sites like <A href=http:\/\/myspace.com\/>MySpace<\/a>, <A href=http:\/\/www.livejournal.com\/>LiveJournal<\/a> and <a href=http:\/\/www.vox.com\/>Vox<\/a> exist.  Heck, I have a LiveJournal account so I can keep up with what&#8217;s going on in my friends&#8217; lives.  But I don&#8217;t think I read anybody&#8217;s personal journal who&#8217;s not also a real-life friend.  Such sites are the extension into cyberspace of real-life relationships, which is interesting to me, but a separate topic.\n<li>Having comments is a good sign.  It means that the blogger is trying to start a conversation, and is interested in more than just hearing themselves speak.  One of the great achievements a blogger can attain in my eyes is to be the seed around which a community forms.\n<li>Attention to detail must be apparent on every page.  Because of search engines, the author doesn&#8217;t have control of where a visitor will arrive, so having high quality content throughout the site is important.\n<\/ul>\n<p>So those are the thoughts I have on writing a blog that would be of interest to me.  Note that I don&#8217;t feel strongly enough about these recommendations to follow my own advice.  This blog doesn&#8217;t have a focus.  It is more in the realm of self-expression than of fostering community.  My posts tend towards the rambling.  But I&#8217;m okay with that &#8211; I have not yet found a focus that compels me enough to write about it regularly.  We&#8217;ll get there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My mentor from the Columbia program, Jon Williams, recently started a blog, and asked me if I had any advice about blogging. That got me thinking about what makes for a good blog, so I&#8217;m sharing my thoughts here. The blogosphere is intensely competitive in terms of the attention economy. When blogs I read link [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}