Salocin

What makes a weblog?

I recently added this site to yoursite.nu, and a few people have reviewed it. Although some of the reviews are very useful, it seems some reviewers got as far as realizing that there are 3 columns and a lot of text to it, and then posted something (positive or negative) that isn't all that much use. Certainly the reviews of zen boards are often from people that didn't read the faq and didn't really pick up on what it's for.

One comment drew my attention though ... first because it was complimentary and I'm sucker for a nice word, but also because the poster suggested I put up something about me. I've often considered putting up an "about me" section, and always rejected the idea, because this blog isn't... really... about me. In fact, I'm not sure what this blog is about, since I just write on whichever subject appears to be most inspiring at the time.

All the text makes my eyes not want to read. Maybe not. Woah, you have alot of archives. Your blogs are very intelligent (I don't mean it as you don't come off as intelligent; but some people have ways of sounding intelligent here, then making posts with internet lingo every other word.) Eventhough the design is simple, overall, I like your site. But, maybe, you should add a bit about yourself?
- aira

The "about" link is often the first link I click on a site when I first visit it. It gives context to what's written, because you can understand certain points of view better given that context. The first two characteristics I always look for are age and sex. I am usually disappointed by the rest of the personal profile. I think it's an awareness that most people might be similarly disappointed upon reading my profile that makes me reluctant to write one. We often look for people with similar backgrounds, of either sex, when we browse other people's blogs, and I don't think I'm going to get many people reading my blog because they empathise with my background. It's not special, I'd be surprised if many people thought it sounded similar to theirs, or that they're going to particularly empathise with me because of it. Since it costs you a little privacy to write a background statement, you want something in return, and I don't think making such things public is going to be worth the cost in my case. I'll let you know if I change my mind.

When I come across a gung-ho Republican website, I have to admit that I'm usually quickly turned off by the bias, singlemindedness and the venom I find there. The same goes for websites that have as their founding principle the pursuit pursuit of any "marginal" or "minority" or "interest group" agenda: pro-life, pro-choice, feminist, republican, democrat, gay or lesbian, it all feels too much like looking at life through a lens that removes all perspective and objectivity. And they're almost always angry and defensive. I don't have to agree with someone to think their weblog is great - it's hard to beat lenin's tomb for fantastic provocative content.

What else do we have? Well of course there's the "babyblog" or the "pregnancyblog", and while I understand a parent's hormonally-fed desire to share with the world their little bundle of joy, I have no interest. There's also the average-average blog, in which someone who has no real content to feed outside appetites feels the need to share information such as "I just installed firefox" or "going to watch a baseball game tonight", in order to fill empty spaces on their blogs. These seem to be in the majority, and a few of them will undoubtedly mature to become quite good, but they have to go through some sort of blog adolescence in which they squeeze their spots in public before they find their style and stride. Finally, there's linkblogs, which just link to every story the author finds of passing interest, more often than not driving traffic to the major news sites, and as a group all linking to the same damn things.

There are actually very few great personal weblogs out there - my favourite of the moment was mentioned in a recent post. It takes good writing skills, and an ability to recount events that - for me at least - are far too personal to share. I leave that to those braver and more qualified than I.

A recent visitor called Sam posted the following:

If you want my attention for a while, write a really good post for us all on why exactly people are so desperate for traffic! I am being serious, not making fun of you or anyone else, I am guilty of it too. I find it perplexing though the desperation that some people exhibit for readers

It's an interesting question, because although we all know why (we all feel it), it's not the easiest thing to put into words. My thoughts would be...

It's why you started. Most people who write websites are not interested in writing for the sake of getting their words into storage, otherwise they're be typing into a word processor. We write, and we post, because we're looking for validation, or to test our opinions against that of the public, or to put our lives on show in the hopes that others will sympathise or somehow be attracted to our daily grind. The more arrogant among us probably like to think they're educating their visitors. When we start, we figure the worse that can happen is that people don't agree with us. After a month or so, we figure out that it's much worse than that: people aren't even caring enough to read. After that initial period of denial, we realise that we're going to have to fight for traffic, and that's what BlogExplosion and all the other things we all join work off - this need to advertise our free (often worthless) journalistic endeavours.

Comparative value. It's happened to everyone - you come across a weblog, and it's the most completely vacuous load of drivel you've ever read. In my case, this usually means that it's in pink and there are more smilies than there is punctuation. Then we see that each gut-churningly bad post on this weblog has about 150 comments, and that the referers list proudly displayed on the bottom of the page is longer than the entire content of your own site. So you go back to your site, read through it, and wonder how on earth it's possible for someone who writes that blandly and that badly to get so much attention when the effort you put into your own site goes completely unrewarded. You start craving traffic because if that site can get it, then surely you can too. Of course what you don't realize is that the site is being read by lots of people just like the author, and that that site isn't your competition, because you probably don't want those people posting on your site anyway.

It all comes down to currency. Visits are the currency by which our weblogs are valued. If people visit and disappear within moments, it feels as though they walked out of a film, or stopped reading a book halfway through the first paragraph - it's a statement about the quality of your writing and your content that isn't pleasant. If no-one visits at all, that feels like the same statement, but made through the fact that no-one wants to link to you. It's not necessarily accurate, because if people can't find your site in the first place, they can't very well be judging it's value, but the hits-as-blog-currency argument makes more sense to me than links-as-blog-currency used by so many webblog ranking systems.

I've never been well-linked, and it probably took me about 2 years to get over that. Now I have a small collection of regular readers, they drop by briefly but regularly, and seem to check the headlines of the new articles and read those that interest them. They seem to post rarely - the prefer to lurk. I'm happy for them to lurk, and I'm grateful that they think - however silently - that what I write is worth reading.

Posted by nlvp at November 11, 2004 03:08 PM