Your Ad Here

Archive for the 'Blogging' Category

What If The Signal Is Noise?

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on August 31, 2007
in Blogging
. Comments

Confession: I don’t actually read Slashdot any more. There — I said it. I’m sorry. I want to say that I am faithful to that venerable institution that is Slashdot, but I simply don’t have the time.

I do like to follow “what’s going on” on the web/tech bleeding edge, though. Have I switched to Digg, Reddit, HackerNews, the New York Times Technology section? No, no, maybe, and no.

I’ve found the best way to see what’s going on, what’s new, what’s interesting, is to just put the feed to http://del.icio.us/popular into my Google Reader.

All that is a preamble to the title of the post. If you follow the sort of things that appear in del.icio.us/popular (or Digg… or Reddit… or Some Other Webby News Place), you tend to find a lot of lists. That’s okay; lists can be nice. They can be a genuinely handy reference, a good way to separate the wheat from the chaff in a given search, motivating, and informative.

If you also follow the sort of blogs you might call metablogs — blogs about blogging, and usually about increasing traffic ergo Making More Money — you will have seen that “list posts” have acquired a vaunted status as a sort of Uber Link Bait. People like “list posts,” they link to them, they bookmark them, they may even rave about them and revisit them many times. For good reason — as I said, a good list of links, instructions, or ideas can be genuinely useful.

That being said — increasingly you find blogs that seem to be made up almost exclusively by lists. Smashing Magazine comes to mind; Mashable is becoming increasingly so (though they do still have Actual Content).

This morning I came across this on del.icio.us/popular: Firefox God: 300+ tools and resources for Firefox.

300? PLUS??

That seems a little excessive. When a list of tips, tools or resources grows to 300… is it still really useful? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know… I do know that when I do a Google search, I rarely look past the first page of results — there’s just too many, and I expect the information I need to be in the top ten or twenty results. When I look at a list, I am looking for something I can digest quickly; show me five, ten, maybe twenty items.

Maybe I’m old fashioned; maybe I’m unrealistic. Maybe lists of 300 items have their place as a resource, if they are well-organized and if they are not just random samplings, but well-considered selections. Maybe lists like that are why Mashable reportedly earns $166,000 per month, and this blog earns only a few dollars. I’m not trying to slam Mashable, list posts in general, A-list-type blogs, linkbaiting, or anything like that. I’m sure I’ve written a list or two in the past, and will probably write more — given the statistics, maybe I should be.

Sometimes, though, the mass of these information-stuffed articles just seems like noise.

How Not To Blog

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on June 15, 2007
in Blogging
. Comments

The Blog Graphic

The title of this post might be a good title for this blog, not to mention countless others. When I pulled all the content over from my obese XML file which bore every post and comment from the previous host I was on, I was only able to copy chunks at a time; 50 or so at a time, I guess. That took a little while, but it was worth doing, as everything is Back As It Should Be. However, in the process, I got to glance over the titles of all the posts I’d written on this weblog over the last two+ years.

And… yech. I wrote all that? For what? Now, partly this is just the common trait of being one’s own worst critic, partly it’s because some of my views have either changed or softened in the last few years, partly it’s just… well. I observed a few things that embarrassed me about my own posts (to the point where I questioned, a few times, whether I really wanted to save all this dreck for posterity), so here are a collection of thoughts, conveniently phrased in the form of Old Testament commandments, a la Scroobius Pip, or, if you prefer… Moses:

  • Thou Shalt Not Say Things About Opposing Political Viewpoints that you would not also be willing to say to someone’s face if that person happened to be of that persuasion… and a friend. That is, people we disagree with are still people.
  • Thou Shalt Not Peruse Digg And Del.icio.us for the sole purpose of finding some neat thing to put on your blog with a two-sentence summary, the same two-sentence summary (basically) as you will see on five thousand other blogs.
  • Thou Shalt Not Parrot the exact same thing as some other large herd of the “blogosphere” is saying, the only difference being that you happen to be saying it on your website.
  • Thou Shalt Not complain, whine, moan, and/or sulk in public.
  • Thou Shalt Not Write about what does not interest you.
  • Thou Shalt not write about movies, books, games, software, comics, memes, etc, unless you have an actual review or meaningful insight or opinion to put forth.

Hrm. Some of these I have violated worse than others. Some (the complaining) I have (hopefully) done very rarely, because I don’t really like seeing that sort of thing on a weblog.

Pros and Cons of Starting Over

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on June 4, 2007
in Blogging
. 2 Comments

I’m out of town on a team meeting, so any further efforts at restoring the last two+ years of blog-posting to this server will be put on hold. In the meantime, I’m debating the pros and cons of simply starting over.

Certainly, there’s something to be said for having a lot of archives. Popular posts from weeks or months or years back can draw new traffic consistently, long after they were originally posted and indexed by Google. A few of the longer comment threads which lived here, such as those following my posts about David & Dale Garrett’s Scripture in Song, would be nice to restore — if for no other reason than how cool it was to hear other people’s stories about how much that music meant to them.

From an SEO perspective, there’s also a certain value to having a lot of content — SEO interests me, but the blog was hardly a money-maker, ads or no. So except for a few posts which had some sort of sentimental value… it wouldn’t really bother me that much to just leave it alone and start over.

That being said, I’ve been asking myself, if I do just choose to start from here from scratch, whether I’ll continue the blog in the same vein (a little of this and a little of that), or whether I’d try to focus on a more narrow topic. And if so, what topic? I love using, cheer-leading, and following the development of desktop Linux, but you can only write so many “is this the year of desktop Linux?” posts before it starts to drive you slightly mad.

Anyways, those are some of my thoughts. We’ll see what happens. If a reader happens to have strong feelings one way or the other on preserving blog archives for posterity versus starting over, I’d be interested to hear other points of view on the idea.