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OR EMAILGetting Philisophical On Blogging
Maybe it’s because we’ve seen five temples and a Zen garden in the past two days, but I found this post over at Rex Hammock’s blog very interesting, where he contemplates and attempts to answer the eternal question “Why do I blog?”
I actually found his answers rather interesting as he considers the blog a very personal experience, doesn’t really consider it “writing” and that he doesn’t blog for an audience.
I’m also reconsidering some aspects of my own blog and why I blog. It’s a bit simplistic to say that this vacation has shifted a few of my priorities in the short term.
I’ve sort of hit a point where the more I write on a daily basis doesn’t seem to affect my traffic numbers, which keep increasing ever so slightly due to the past, non-time sensitive posts. Meaning, I’m finding I’m getting far more traffic from an older, higher quality, opinionated post like one on The Beatles or The Bangles than a time-sensitive one on Google buying YouTube. The latter type of posts peaks quickly and fades away.
I guess this is just my technical justification for saying that I’m growing weary of the Techmeme chasing game and may shift the focus of this blog to fewer, longer, higher quality posts. I’ll still comment on technology stuff regularly, but I think it will be driven more by what I genuinely find interesting and can comment on than what’s the top story on Techmeme.
I think at the very least this means dropping down to two posts a day.
Blame it all on staring at rocks in a garden.
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I hit this a while back (probably just around when I found out about your blog). The echo chamber thing is fun, but if I want to write about Yahoo Pipes it’ll be after spending 20 hours using it to build some application I really want, like displaying my Technorati rank as an RSS widget… not because a press release came out on TechCrunch 5 minutes ago.
Chasing traffic is always annoying in the long term because you end up with crap posts.
Ah yes mr engtech always a few steps ahead. I guess one could say this week away from blogging was rather a litmus test. I was sort of expecting the traffic to go in the dumper but it actually increased. Go figure.
The blog is an ever changing thing and I’m still learning what works and doesn’t for me to keep from burning out on the whole thing.
I tend to agree. Unless “news blogging” is your full-time occupation, I’ve found it to be a losing game. That sort of thing requires a writer to be more of a journalist, with sources and contacts and trying to be first to break a story. It’s hard work and time consuming and requires resources that most writers don’t have (like the afore-mentioned sources and contacts).
The value of a blog, if the writer is indeed writing for an audience, is the insight and context it provides. Viacom suing Google is big news, but your take on the “You in YouTube” is something I haven’t seen anywhere else.
Also, I enjoy finding the relative “zeitgeist” of recent tech/net happenings here. After the dust settles, it’s nice to see the status of things.
Yeah I’m definitely no journalist
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[...] while on vacation and thought his answers were pretty interesting. (I actually linked to said post here). He also has noticed that “Why do I blog?” has taken [...]
Very interesting post. I’m actually not a big fan of the meme stuff. I think what’s important it to post relavant content that would be of interest to the readers.
Other than that, I think blogging is about having fun and doing something you really enjoy, because why else blog?
Just my 2 cents!