Significance of No Comments
About the situation you face, when people don’t respond to your posts.
It’s called Warnock’s Dilemma and it’s a common feeling for owners of commentable weblogs. Classy’s kithchen provides good background information.
Interesting.
If you use comments as a way to measure and display your status in the blogosphere, it will very soon influence your style of writing.
Since I hacked together the Google Hits script (in the sidebar) I have become more focused on the search-engine hits. If I need more google traffic I should go for populism. Again a style-modification.
My personal blog is listed on Blogbot.dk and our thesis blog is listed on JavaBlogs. To get hits from blogportals/metablogs you need to focus on a catchy subject and make sure that the first two or three lines are teasing as hell. It is also good to point to content that is not exposed on the portals,”this image was shot…” or “I just found out why I have no problem getting laid…”
All of this is influencing the way you write and the way you choose what to write about.
You must make a choice everytime you post an entry to your blog. Can you attract traffic without compromising your integrity?
This is not easy. But we try.
15. October 2003 kl. 11:10
One has to recognize the tongue-in-cheek to appreciate the Warnock campaign. I write for noone but myself - If someboyd finds that interesting, that is gratifying; but never the point of writing.
15. October 2003 kl. 11:32
It is THE point of writing for me! Why else bother? Note-2-myself´s can more easily be written in a.. yes.. notebook! I´m a victim of the What-ever-u-call-it-syndrom! And practices “Catchy hook-lines to the Limit”. Guilty of All of the Above! ;=)
15. October 2003 kl. 12:26
Thats A Way to get exposed as well; re-publish your posts every hour. Blogbot has recorded this blog-post again 12:02 - neat! ;=)
15. October 2003 kl. 12:59
Yup!
I’m just exploiting a security breach on blogbot — it can’t tell the difference between posting and editing.
;-)
15. October 2003 kl. 14:16
Claus, If you are writing for noone but yourself, why have you chosen this medium?
This is a social networked activity. And you do hava an audience. And you know that.
By writing in the open your writings are divided into the things you wrote and the stuff we read. And you can’t do anything about it.
At least that’s how I see it.
15. October 2003 kl. 18:15
There’s a difference between writing to express ones opinions and then sharing those opinions and “writing for eyeballs”. I thought your original post was about “writing for eyeballs”.
I’m not naive - of course I publish to be read - but the point of that is mainly to sharpen what I write. When you have to explain yourself to somebody else you need to write better. I’ve been writing a blog on paper (a plog?) since 1988. (NOT a diary, but exactly a paper log of ideas and stuff I’ve seen, heard or read) - publishing ups the ante.
The second thing about a blog is that it allows you to publish your opinions on current events in a logical setting, instead of doing writing letters to the editor for newspapers. You don’t get the newspaper readership, but the ability to publish several related bits and linking them to one another more than compensates.
15. October 2003 kl. 22:49
Claus - I agree with you.
The first post was but not alone about writing for eyeballs.
I think that the two blogging-positions that you describe co-exist like competing motives or something like that.
These motives could be seen as interacting with each other and you and the text you eventually will produce.
Am I babbling here? Yes. It is a bit foggy which probably means that I haven’t sorted it out yet. If ever ;-)
6. October 2007 kl. 00:45
turning of comments.
This post seems to be a honey pot for comment spammers.