Category: Bloggers and blogging

Stuff about fellow bloggers or their blogs.

Worrisome trends in blogging

Today you get the companion post I promised last night.

I had planned on just doing the first part, which shows a trend among blogs that I found fascinating. But then the tail end of this piece came about thanks to an article linked from Bill Duvall and Duvafiles, written by Jennifer Harper in Tuesday’s Washington Times.

First things first, though. As most of you have likely noticed (those of you not reading through an RSS feed), at the left hand side of monoblogue I have a box that shows my influence ranking in the state of Maryland, according to BlogNetNews. I point this out not necessarily to show my ranking (currently #5) but to use the peer group I’m in as an example for my theories. For the record, here is the top 20 list:

  1. Pocomoke Tattler
  2. Salisbury News
  3. PolitickerMD
  4. Charles County Cafe
  5. monoblogue
  6. Worcester Right
  7. Maryland Politics (better known as Red Maryland)
  8. Maryland Moment
  9. The Sun – The Session
  10. The Main Adversary
  11. Maryland Politics Today
  12. Baltimore Reporter
  13. The Dagger
  14. Free State Politics
  15. Inside Charm City
  16. The No BS Zone
  17. Lost On The Shore
  18. Brian Griffiths
  19. Maryland Politics Watch
  20. On The Record

In this case, I’ll skip the links; they’re easily enough checked out through BlogNetNews. There were three key items I looked at among this group of websites.

One recent trend that you may not be able to notice just by the names is that the mainstream publishing media has gotten into the blogging business in a big way. Newspaper-related blogs, which rarely had a ranking when the process started last spring, make up 20% of the list this time around. PolitickerMD is a localized web publication of the New York Observer, Maryland Moment comes from the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun is behind their blog on the General Assembly session at #9, and On The Record is part of the Daily Record newspaper. A segment that used to be alternative media is now beginning to be co-opted by those entities who bloggers originally fought against, and they have a whole army of people who are paid to contribute new content.

A second item is the number and complexity of crossposts among several of those listed. It’s argued that the crossposting process games the ratings, and that might be true to an extent. I counted ten of the twenty who feature crossposts to at least another member in the rankings, at least that I’m aware of. Of any top twenty blog, Red Maryland probably has the most benefit since they receive input from 7 other bloggers and/or their contributors who reside in the ranking: Salisbury News, monoblogue, The Main Adversary, Maryland Politics Today, Baltimore Reporter, The No BS Zone, and Brian Griffiths. That tangled web can work through several other sites as well – P.K. Burns of Maryland Politics Today also contributes to Salisbury News along with Red Maryland, so his posts could be on four different sites simultaneously, counting BlogNetNews. It’s a lot of exposure, but perhaps it cannibalizes his own site to some degree.

However, to me the largest trend is that of consolidation. Of the sixteen Top 20 sites which aren’t newspaper-affiliated, at least seven of them have multiple contributors. I already mentioned Red Maryland, made up by 18 writers, but other examples are Baltimore Reporter, which weighs in with 11 co-authors, Salisbury News with seven contributors, and Charles County Cafe with seven as well. Other multi-writer sites are The Dagger, Free State Politics, and Maryland Politics Watch. I believe Pocomoke Tattler is a husband-and-wife team but couldn’t verify that.

In other words, I’m now in a minority position as some sites have recently picked up additional writers. Locally, Salisbury News has followed this example over the last six months in going from a solo outfit to seven writers. Obviously it allows for more frequent posting of content, and that drives readership to see a site more often. Meanwhile, the solo practicioners on the list have put up anywhere from 4 to 55 posts this month. That 55 figure is from Worcester Right, which generally is a news digest site. Without that, the average for March so far among this group is about 11 posts, or roughly one per day.

It does tend to prove what John Hawkins noted last night on the 1500 word theory, but in this case the more successful blogs tend to be collaborative and manage to succeed because they can put up a lot more stuff in the course of a day. Meanwhile, a contributor doesn’t need to have the fuss of posting something daily, which is hard to do for many people unless you really want to devote a chunk of time to it.

While I’m going to keep trying to be the exception which proves the rule, it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take the right offer that came along to be part of a larger group, perhaps as a guest blogger. Right Wing News is an example, as John uses guest bloggers on weekends. They get increased readership and he gets weekends off. Most likely I’d keep this site running regardless, but there’s times a setup such as that sounds appealing.

All this may not matter a hill of beans though if the Washington Times story is correct. According to a Harris poll just 4 percent of people read political blogs daily, and the number is fewest among the younger set. (That shocked me.) Meanwhile, there’s 100,000 new competitors a day for my readership if you believe Technorati. Could it be that political blogging isn’t the hot new trend anymore? I’m not sure where people would move on to, but I think some of this stems from the fact that most political bloggers simply regurgitate talking points and stretch the truth for their own purposes instead of making the attempt to analyze policies and educate readers. Whether it’s fair to say it or not, our craft comes across as the wild, wild west, and the entry of newspapers and television networks as internet sources probably has hurt our readership as well. They do their own blogs, as I noted above, but those come with the legitimacy of the news organization behind it.

A shakeout might not be such a bad thing though. Once we get rid of the bad apples who simply exist to trash a person or their philosophy, the political side of the blogging world may get its respect back. I may not have the greatest readership numbers, but I think I do have the greatest readers because they usually can comment in a reasonable manner whether they agree or disagree. Eventually this could change when monoblogue is discovered by a much larger number of people, but for now the forum seems to run pretty well.

Unfortunately, the bad reputation that some bloggers give to all of us is going to haunt the genre for awhile longer. All of us have to work harder at being factual and accurate while still maintaining an edge – only then can we bring a larger share than 4% to those websites we work hard to maintain.

A new category and a look at my success

Tonight I decided to add a new category for my posts, as you can see up top. I seem to write about other bloggers and their blogs quite a bit, plus I indulge in navel-gazing from time to time – so a new category made sense. And this edition will have its share of introspection because I ran across an excellent post from John Hawkins, who writes Right Wing News. The subject was The Top 10 Reasons Bloggers Don’t Succeed. It played off another recent post of his where he interviewed five of the most prominent female bloggers, who gave their opinions on success and other aspects of blogging while female.

Of course, when you consider that Hawkins is a full-time blogger who makes his living at the craft and that he has been blogging for over seven years, perhaps it’s no shock that his readership dwarfs mine by a factor of almost 100. I suppose he qualifies as an expert observer! To me, it was an opportunity to learn and see where I could improve.

With that, let’s look at his ten reasons that bloggers don’t succeed:

  • They’re just not very good.

With that one, I have to say I don’t qualify. It’s not to toot my own horn, but I have more fans than detractors and monoblogue is not my only writing outlet. Stylistically I’m sure I don’t appeal to everyone but I can write in complete sentences and paragraphs with words that 99% of the time are spelled correctly. One of my favorites is the Merriam-Webster website so I look up words on a daily basis.

If there were one criticism I have about myself, I really need to sit and ponder on a thesaurus. I notice I overuse phrases at times.

  • They don’t cover interesting material.

As Hawkins puts it, “Are you willing to spend the time it takes looking for stories or are you just going to write about whatever is on the Drudge Report today?”

I spend probably as much time reading as I do writing, and part of that is an effort to find things which appeal to me and that I think can become an interesting post. And I do look for unique angles, not taking things completely at face value – particularly on a news release from a politician or political group.

But the key to this is that I write about things which interest me. My task is to make that interesting to the reader and hopefully I succeed on a regular basis. This is also why I don’t just do politics because I get burned out on the topic after several days in a row. So you get my “Weekend of local rock” or Shorebird of the Week posts simply to change things up.

  • They’re not unique enough.

I touched on this point in my comments immediately above, and I think the two go hand-in-glove. I try not to make this like anyone else’s site because, quite frankly, there aren’t a while lot of people like me. (I can hear the chorus now, led by my two ex-wives: Thank God!)  So why should my site be like someone else’s?

  • They don’t network.

On this one I’m somewhat guilty as far as my fellow bloggers at Red Maryland or in the Maryland Bloggers Alliance go. Part of that is simply distance. But I know and have met many of my fellows locally who do political sites. Certainly I make them aware I read the sites because I leave my name and URL when I comment about 99% of the time. Once in a great while I’ll be anonymous when I feel I need to, but usually you’ll know it’s me.

I could do a better job in this respect I’m sure.

  • They don’t promote their work.

In my case this is true to an extent and it’s something I really should get back to.

While I do crosspost to Red Maryland and contribute a post or two to the Carnival of Maryland every two weeks, I got away from something I did for awhile and this particular point may be the impetus for me to begin again with a slightly different tactic.

For about 4 to 6 months, each weekend I sent out an e-mail called “This week on monoblogue.” On it would be a list of 3 to 5 bullet points about posts I was planning on writing for the upcoming week. But the issue I ran into was beginning to feel like I was placing myself in a box by promising posts about certain items while other, more interesting subjects would arise. I’d still feel obligated to write about those subjects I alluded to in my e-mail rather than the fresher items.

What I may do instead was something another blogger I link to has done, and it’s similar to that concept Hawkins illustrates. Bob McCarty would send out an occasional e-mail about posts he thought were interesting – more often than not I’d check them out. However, I haven’t seen one lately so maybe he’s marketing in a different manner. And in this business it is all about marketing.

  • They’re not consistent enough. They take days off.

If there’s any one of these I don’t do, this is the one. I pride myself on not missing a day, fortunately thanks to WordPress it’s easy for me to take days off but not have readers notice. In fact, yesterday was one of those days. I wrote two posts Monday night and posttimed one to run last night. Didn’t suspect a thing did you?

  • Doing their initial promos too early.

If anything, what I did wrong in December of 2005 was not promo myself. Then again, at that time I really didn’t know any other bloggers so I had no idea who to promote myself with!

At present though I do get promos on occasion. Sometimes the sites are good and once in awhile they really succeed. I think the first one who ever asked me was Philip Pidot, who does a website called Suitably Flip. He’s gone on to bigger and better things to be sure.

  • They don’t link out enough.

With one exception, if I find something worth writing about from another’s website I link to them and trackback if the opportunity is there. Of course, I also expect credit when people use my writing and a trackback if possible.

Actually, unless I slip up there aren’t exceptions. I just put the first part in to tweak Joe Albero since he ragged on me about not doing that. This site tweaks him better though. (By the way, that was two links, so I’m doing my part.)

  • They don’t post enough each day.

What John Hawkins claims in his post is that he averages 6 posts and 2500 words a day; of course he’s a full-time blogger. His yardstick for mere mortals like me is “at least 1500 words a day,” spread out over a number of posts.

So I got curious and checked out the length of my 15 most recent posts, which I placed over about 15 days. Surprisingly to me, the average post was 828 words. It seems like I write a lot more, but the numbers don’t lie and none of these individual posts added up to 1500 words.

But my ideal as far as length of post is to have it as long as a newspaper column, like something by Ann Coulter. In fact, I just did a quick count of last week’s Coulter column and it weighed in at 848 words, so I’m generally hitting the length about right.

Thus, it stands to reason that in order to have a better chance at success in this portion of the list I’d have to write 2 or 3 posts a day. It is an idea I’ll consider, at least on an occasional basis as time allows. Actually, I will write two tonight because there’s a related aspect to this point that I wanted to get into but it would work better as a separate post anyway. So look for another post to come up tomorrow after lunch.

And finally…

  • They don’t hang around long enough.

Even in doing monoblogue just since December of 2005, I’ve seen a bunch of blogs come and go. There’s some I really miss and some that I wondered what the point was. Can doing a blog be a grind? Of course. As I noted above, it’s fortunate I can write this in such a way that I can take days off, but most who start blogs do really well for a month, then slack off, then decide to heck with it.

But I’ve noticed a trend in blogging, one that I’m going to discuss in my next post. In the meantime, I think that I avoid most of the pitfalls John Hawkins discussed, and to be quite honest after checking the numbers of many of my peers I do succeed better than the majority of them. No, the numbers aren’t where I’d like them to be but when I look at my initial goal of being happy with a few hundred readers a week I’m well ahead of that.

As crazy as it may seem, I’m going to keep on doing what I do because the fun hasn’t gone out of it.