October 8, 2006

If You Are New To This Blog…

You may not have seen this. Those images, created by Grande Reportagem magazine, made their way to me in the form of an odd email, which you can read about here and here. I took the liberty of putting them into a presentation format. It’s a template for the kind of presentation work I would […]

You may not have seen this.

Those images, created by Grande Reportagem magazine, made their way to me in the form of an odd email, which you can read about here and here. I took the liberty of putting them into a presentation format. It’s a template for the kind of presentation work I would love to do eventually.

Jonny Baker picked up on this for his worship tricks series and VJ Village also linked to it. Both those links created a noticeable bump in traffic back then, when this blog lived in even greater obscurity than it does now. To date no other page I have created has attracted as much traffic. However, the bump didn’t really have a lasting effect on my traffic and within a couple of months, the number were back to where they had been before.

The blogger’s lesson, is that the A-list links didn’t put this blog on the virtual map. When I get the occasional emails that come from bloggers asking for links or comments on their sites and I do my best to oblige, esepcially if their words (or music, or images) are interesting. However, it is worth remembering that a one-off link can only do so much.

[tags] Grande Reportagem [/tags]

Tagged Blogging, Daily Life, Globalisation, Spirituality

Rodd Jefferson 18 years ago

So true. The other thing to be aware of is that your Technorati ranking is only valid for 180 days., according to this link

https://www.bloggersblog.com/cgi-bin/bloggersblog.pl?bblog=1007061

Google CEO Eric Schmidt joked a few days ago that most blogs have precisely one reader, the blogger himself.

Take hope that this is not the case for you. And keep writing, you never know what journalistic jackpot you’ll hit!

Fernando Gros 18 years ago

I’m far from dispondent, just trying to keep the realism going. This blog numbers still amaze me and I’m really really happy with how it has gone. Given that I’m really a nobody, it is very humbling to see the response.

Schmidt’s comment is a bit off though, as are those of people who want to call blogs narcissistic. To me there is a lot of worth in low traffic conversations, because that is what civilisation (for want of a better word) is built on. Neighbourly chats over the fence, parents at the bustop picking up their kids, strangers waiting in a cue – all these tiny conversations make us human. To deride blogs because they don’t generate a lot of traffic seems to me to be arrogant in the extreme and fundamentally anti-human.

I agree. It’s just that the backyard fence is now made of carefully linked boxes and wires. Happy to share a conversation with you anyday.

And the realism is helpful. I’ll confess to regularly going to my own website and clicking the refresh button, just to see if anybody has posted a comment (sad, but desperately true!).

Rodd, FWIW, this blog went a long time with almost no comments. I really don’t have a good theory for what generates comment-traffic, but my experience is it takes time for it to develop.

I know in my case, part of the reason there are not more comments is that a number of readers are just not the commenting type. Quite a few don’t blog, or do online forums or just aren’t into the idea of leaving public comments. Despite the increase in the number of comments over the year, it is still the case that I get more emails about the blog than comments left on it.

Perhaps, there is also an issue here of how wired your “physical” networks are.

brodie 18 years ago

I while back Maggi Dawn linked to me which like your link from Johnny temporality boosted my traffic. Like you the effect was short lived. What I’ve also noticed is that the people I was connecting at when I first started to blog has changed. I’m not sure of the reason for this, I guess one issue is that most people just want to stick to their “own” networks, so if your not part of their “group” then it’s hard to get noticed. In this respect the blogsphere can be quite an unfriendly place. I guess also that it’s hard to keep up with so many blogs, thus there are blogs I no longer read because well I’m reading yours!

I do however think that it’s just good manners to indicate that your reading someone’s blog by leaving a comment. I’ve certainly tried to make this my practice, although if the persons interested etc are very different from mine it can be hard to join in, but I can at least leave a comment along the lines of, “hey thought I’d just leave a comment o say that I’m reading your blog and enjoying your writing”.

Brodie thanks for your comments. You are right about the way networks in the blogosphere can exclude. It’s not different to other netwrks really. There are loads of great blogs out there that are somewhat obscure for a host of reasons, despite having interesting content.

I agree totally on your thoughts about comments. Comments are really important and it saddens me a bit when bloggers switch them off or ignore them.

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