Really M.G.?
You, of all people, is calling out Mashable over their playing a SEO pageview grabbing stunt on the back of the Osama bin Laden raid?
That’s rich and really there is only one thing to say:
The state of comments and blacklisting entire hosting domains
Blogs live and breath because of comments.
For me they are the life blood of blogging. They are the rich tapestry of conversation around ideas that add so much value to what bloggers write. Sure there are the fluff you r0x0r type crap but for the most part they are overshadowed by comments that are sometimes worth of blog posts by themselves.
The problem is that comments are dying. At least the comments on the originating blogs are, if not dying, slowly fading away. Instead we are seeing them happening on social network sites like Facebook, Buzz, Twitter and others like them – many of which bloggers will never see or read.
I don’t blame our readers for deciding to move away from the blogs themselves, even if I really hate that it is happening. After all commenting has become a tangled web of sign-ons and other hindrances which do more to dissuade people from commenting at the original source. So in turn bloggers are put in a position of having to make sure their content is available everywhere possible. Personally I think this dilutes the pool of great conversations but like I said I understand.
Being comfortable with who you are
There’s a lot of blogs out there giving all kinds of advise; some good, some not so good, and some just plain bullshit meant for pageviews. I know because I see their posts almost everyday and it never ceases to amaze me just how many time the same basic principals get re-worded, mashed up, or pointified.
If it could all be boiled down into a simple one sentence idea it would probably be something like this: write with passion in a niche area that you are really passionate about and make sure to link out to as many people as you can because that is the economy of the web.
So we end up with a proliferation of SEO enriched posts with lots of bold text that devalue the principals of the link economy even worse than it is now. Sure that might pull in the pageviews for a period of time and might even make you some money but just how long can you carry this on. At what point does it all begin like you are on auto-pilot.
At what point does your writing see your carefully crafted sarcasm devolve into irritating snarkiness for snarkiness sake. When do you suddenly find yourself just hitting the post button in order to make sure you get something posted.How about when you read yous own post only to find it empty of any real value having turned into something that just is taking up space.
When do you arrive at the point when you have to look in the mirror ans ask how comfortable are you with yourself and what you are doing?
Don’t hate the regurgitation
One of the constant complaints you will hear about blogging, especially within the tech world, is that we are constantly repeating .. and repeating .. and repeating .. the same old stories that first get published by the top tier blogs. To be clear this doesn’t include things like splogs and scrapers since those can’t be classified as blogs of any value the charge to a very large degree is justified.
It’s also a charge that the mainstream media likes to lord over us lowly bloggers. Ya, like we don’t know that they all use Associated Press or Reuters sanitized articles to fill out the blank spaces thereby justifying their advertising rates. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
As irritating as this constant regurgitation of the same news is, there is really no escaping it. After all, consider the incredible amount of information a typical blogger takes in during the course of a day (and it only increases the further up the food chain they go). Myself, I currently have close to 300 RSS feeds I monitor in a day of which I would estimate that some 70% of those feeds update multiple times a day.
This might seem like a lot, but I know of bloggers who would consider that just scratching the surface of what they read. Now toss in Twitter streams, Google Reader Shared Items, Facebook pages and God knows how many other incidental sources of information. All this has to be processed at some level and decisions made about what to write something on plus the fact that we have to make sure that it is current and interesting.
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