Thursday, April 12, 2007
Accounting for Bloggers
Yesterday I looked at the statistics of this blog. One curious stat: there was an almost one-to-one correspondence between the number of items I read in Google Reader and the words I wrote in this blog over a 30-day period. This is probably a coincidence. The two numbers are probably unrelated for the most part, although I would expect that the more you read, the better your blog would capture the zeitgeist. But the more you read, the harder it is to shake off the conversation of the moment to write something truly original.
In terms of blog accounting, bloggers mostly assess themselves by counting visitors and commentors.
I haven't enabled comments on my blog yet, so I'm not really taking full advantage of the medium. This is by choice. I don't regularly comment on other peoples' blogs, and so I'd feel like a hypocrite asking people to comment on my blog.
The other problem is that I'd have to decide how I want to handle comments, a popular topic in the blogopshere these days. Gawker has an interesting approach: If you submit just one interesting comment (per suggestions from Lifehackers guide to weblog comments), they publish it on the blog, and also grant you the right to continue posting comments without prior editing. Then, they thin the herd by "executing" lame commenters (e.g., This week in commenter executions). Posting is a privilege, not a right.
The final problem: What if I enabled comments and nobody said anything? I'd have to spend all day faking it. What a chore.
In terms of blog accounting, bloggers mostly assess themselves by counting visitors and commentors.
I haven't enabled comments on my blog yet, so I'm not really taking full advantage of the medium. This is by choice. I don't regularly comment on other peoples' blogs, and so I'd feel like a hypocrite asking people to comment on my blog.
The other problem is that I'd have to decide how I want to handle comments, a popular topic in the blogopshere these days. Gawker has an interesting approach: If you submit just one interesting comment (per suggestions from Lifehackers guide to weblog comments), they publish it on the blog, and also grant you the right to continue posting comments without prior editing. Then, they thin the herd by "executing" lame commenters (e.g., This week in commenter executions). Posting is a privilege, not a right.
The final problem: What if I enabled comments and nobody said anything? I'd have to spend all day faking it. What a chore.
Labels: blogging
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