Golden rules for blogging clever
Golden rules for blogging clever - Doors - Times Online
A new weblog appears every 5.8 seconds, but writing them can ruin your love life and get you the sack. Robbie Hudson describes how to make blogs a real hit
A few weeks ago, Joe Gordon, an Edinburgh-based book-seller, was having dinner with a friend, who told him that all the hype about online communities was nonsense. (She did not put it quite so delicately.) He was perfectly placed to put her right because, earlier this year, Gordon achieved mild online fame when he became the first person in Britain to be fired for criticising his employer in a blog
Support from the virtual community of bloggers made a difficult period much easier to bear and probably helped persuade Waterstone’s to recant, though by then Gordon had already moved to another shop.
Doesn’t this all sound tickety-boo? Aren’t you eager to join in? After all, the American think-tank Pew Internet reckons that a new blog is created every 5.8 seconds, so it can’t be hard. Do not, however, be tempted. Here be dragons. Keep ye thine eyes skinned for hippo-griffs. The absolute golden rule of blogging — it is literally made of gold — is: “Do not blog.”
Who are you trying to kid? There were 70 billion blogs in the world yesterday, there will be 70 billion billion by next week, and what crazy hubris makes you think you have anything new or interesting to say? Yet you, like all the other lemmings, assume your blog will be one of the tiny fraction that is brilliant, and you’ve already got your gleeful little paws over the edge of the cliff. So all Doors can do is offer a few invaluable tips to stop you embarrassing yourself, ruining your love life, alienating your friends and getting the sack. If you follow them. Which you won’t.
At its simplest, a blog (short for weblog) is a page with dated entries, which usually means “Dear diary”. (Tip number one: does the world really need to know what you had for breakfast?) A recent Gallup poll showed that, in spite of Time magazine declaring 2004 the year of the blog, half of America’s supposedly wired population had never heard of blogging. On the other hand, most Americans couldn’t place America on a map of America, so what does that mean? Well, it means this: don’t assume your friends and family know what blogging is. This is important because, when you start, these are the only people who will read what you write. Whether they keep reading or not is up to you.
The enigmatic and self-confessedly wonderful Greenfairydotcom (www.greenfairy.com) was recently nominated for Best British Blog in the Bloggie awards, hosted for the past five years by a 22-year-old web designer in Michigan, whose bio says it all (at www.fairvue.com/nikolai). The fairy, another twenty-something, but female and from London, chooses to remain anonymous, despite revealing online that she was “voluntarily sterilised in May 2000”. She says that she would read plain text on a white background, so long as it’s interesting: “You may be the next Philip Larkin, but if your blog is set in tiny purple text on a black background, or has a picture of a boy-band member featured prominently, I won’t even pause to read the tag line.”
The easiest way to ensure your blog does not look noticeably awful is to start with a free template (see box). When your blogging delusion has deepened and you want the extra credibility of designing your own page, make things easy by using a dedicated program such as Movable Type (www.sixapart.com/movabletype).
A survey conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests you will probably join the 80% of blogs devoted to “personal musings”. It is easy to mock the drones writing about cats and shopping — see, I just did it — but the American Heather Armstrong, whose www.dooce.com won several Bloggies this year, says that this shouldn’t put you off. Since you can’t control your audience, “you should always write for yourself”, she says. “If what you’re saying has a heart and a soul to it, the audience will come.”
She carefully adds that there is nothing wrong with having nothing interesting to say, and Londoner Tom Coates, whose www.plasticbag.org won a lifetime-achievement Bloggie as well as this year’s Best British Blog, agrees: “Just because it’s in public, it doesn’t mean it’s publishing.” There is room for everyone in cyberspace, and mundane, boring blogs aren’t hurting anyone — just don’t expect an audience.
If you do want an audience, then you have to put in some effort, unless you are lucky enough to be a celebrity already, like Moby or William Shatner, or you are in the right place at the right time, like Salam Pax, who became famous for blogging from Baghdad during the war. This depends on your definition of the right place and time, of course, and on whether, as Pax did, you have something interesting to say. If neither of these things apply, you should start by dreaming up a decent name — “John’s Blog” is going to receive fewer random visitors than “The Cleverest Man on Earth” — and you can be even more cunning than this. If you choose a collection of words that people are likely to search for, you may be able to cheat your way up Google’s charts. Try possible future headlines (“War with France”) or song lyrics (“Way to Amarillo”).
It is also helpful to keep an eye on who is reading your musings, so you can pander slavishly to their prejudices. Check up on your visitors through Technorati, using Trackbacks (details at www.movabletype.org/trackback) or, if you are blogging on Blogger, with Kevin’s Manual Trackback Pinger (www.aylwardfamily.com/content/tbping.asp), which has the advantage of sounding like a much-loved children’s television show. If you pander to other bloggers (describing someone else as brilliant, for example), they might post links to your site from theirs. You will develop a desperate, unshakeable, unslakeable thirst for these links.
Google’s dominance means that its website ranking system is vitally important, and the system is based on links. Bloggers score high in Google searches because they link relentlessly to each other. This might seem incestuous, and it is. A link from Glenn Reynolds, who, as Instapundit, is one of the most widely read bloggers in the world, can provoke an “instalanche” (Instapundit avalanche) of visits. It is incestuous both that this happens and that there is a word for it. A link from any of the big bloggers will have a similar, if lesser, effect.
A bubble of notoriety turned Belle de Jour, reputedly the blog of a London call girl, into a cult, then a fat book deal. If your sex life is not much to write home about, there are other ways to attract a burst of helpful fame. One is to blog so unwisely about your work that you get sacked. Armstrong, who was fired after writing about her co-workers, now tells others, “Be ye not so stupid”, but the press certainly helped her towards blogging fame and glory.
Being fired is not enough, though — other sacked bloggers include the air hostess Ellen Simonetti (www.queenofthesky.com), the former Google employee Mark Jen, and Joe Gordon, who claims he was dismissed without warning for “gross misconduct” because of his blog, and none of them is anywhere near being in the running for a Bloggie. However, if their sites were as classy as Armstrong’s, the notoriety might have given them the leg-up they needed.
Armstrong, Belle de Jour, Greenfairy and Coates are seriously good writers with genuinely interesting opinions. They are free, too.
The respected newspaper columnist Simon Jenkins has nervously pointed out that bloggers might not meet journalistic standards as far as fact-checking goes, but he is nevertheless fearful because, like him, bloggers peddle opinion. He admits: “In truth, I, too, am a blogger, snatching at some item of passing news to argue a case and persuade. And I charge for it. The blogger does it for nothing.
I am on my mettle as never before.” If you peddle opinion, there is no percentage in blandness: another Simon, whose East Meets Westerner contains perhaps the best collection of blogging advice online (at http://simonworld.mu.nu/archives/037779.php), explains that, as in life, “extremism beats moderation and emotion beats logic. If you want reasoned discourse, prepare to dwell in oblivion. If you want invective and ill-considered responses, watch the hits come in”.
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On the other hand, Coates explains that the post-9/11 blogosphere was suddenly filled with “angry people shouting at angry people, distorting arguments to fit their needs and not caring too much about the truth”. He says this was vile — and he was attacked himself — but points out that “you can’t fight for ever, and who’s going to hang around when you’ve got nothing more to shout about?”. If you’d rather not live and die by controversy’s sharp sword, win more durable loyalty by serving a niche such as London’s Tube system, as with www.going-underground.net.
Never forget that if you ever mention someone in a blog, the power of web search engines means that, one day, they will find out. Coates regrets sharing too much information about a bad relationship, but hasn’t removed the material because he rather heroically refuses to edit his own mistake. Armstrong, as well as being fired, wrote an anti-religious diatribe that took her father years to get over. She now censors herself on behalf of her husband, because, “ultimately, he is more important to me than my website”. Romance is clearly not dead.
There are even bigger safety issues. The Malaysian Peter Tan kept blogging during the recent Indonesian earthquake, posting “My apartment is shaking”, and “Bloggers are morons ... Instead of evacuating after the tremor, we, bloggers staying in high-rise apartments, sit here and blog about it”. Tan is an extreme case, but, however seductive it becomes, do remember that your blog is not actually more important than your life.
And now, if you really must...
WHERE TO START
www.blogger.com, www.myblogsite.com, www.livejournal.com
Blog hosting sites with templates that make starting out easy for beginners
www.bloggies.com If you want to be a big blogger, these are what you have to aspire to. Flick through the winners, then try to emulate them
http://simonworld.mu.nu/archives/037779.php Compendious links to tips by bloggers for bloggers
www.eff.org/privacy/anonymity/blog-anonymously.php Excellent safety advice
www.technorati.com/tag/writing Hints from the web about writing
www.editorsweblog.org Is blogging really journalism?
www.anonymizer.com Service that might help you avoid being fired
http://aggregator.weblogs.co.uk, http://blogdex.net www.blogstreet.com www.bloogz.com/rank www.technorati.com www.weblogger.com/yesterdaystop100
June 3, 2005 at 11:39 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink
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