The Emperor’s New Blog
With 2011 being the Year of Web 2.0 (for me, I realise it was probably 2008 for those with their finger on the pulse, but I come from a long line of late adopters – we didn’t get a colour TV until 1979), I’ve been trying to monitor Twitter more regularly of late (pretty sure I didn’t log in once in December, although I joined in November). One aspect I was keen to get to grips with was indeed the whole Web 2.0 ‘n’ social media ‘n’ personal branding area, and where better to start?
As I result, I discovered, probably from a blog, that WordPress alone spawns something like a million new blogs a month – that might not be quite right, but it’s a bloody astounding figure of that kind of magnitude, whatever it actually is. Many, presumably will not be carried on after initial enthusiasm wears off, but still, that is a lot of blogs.
The other thing I’ve found, following links (and links from links from links from links) is that many blogs regurgitate the same old crud, particularly in the marketing/social media arena. I’m thoroughly jaded and blog-weary after only a fortnight. And even the new (to me) stuff is often crap – some self-styled marketing guru (of which there is unfortunately no shortage) I read recently was advising us all to make sure we know someone who knows a billionaire – and in all seriousness. I was little short of dumbfounded. I’m sure having some vague acquaintance with a billionaire is good for business, but it doesn’t follow that all successful businesses need billionaire patronage, does it? Anyway, the blogosphere is full of ill-conceived rancid dick cheese in a similar vein and largely a waste of bandwidth.
More pertinently, while I can’t be arsed checking traffic on Alexa or wherever, and so have to judge purely on the number of comments, even those with fresh and thought-provoking (in a good way, that is) content seem to get little traffic. In any event, even if they get satisfactory traffic figures, surely the point of those blogs that *are* intended as more than online diaries is to generate some discussion and interest, if only shortlived? Otherwise it’s all so many voices crying out into the hubbub…
So yeah, not much change from last week; I’m still wondering what the point of it all is.
Update: I’m not alone. I decided to google my title, for interest’s sake, to see just *how* unoriginal I was being. And lo! I find an outstanding blog post making the point I think I probably wanted to make all along before I got side-tracked by billionaires and smegma.
One of the points of a blog is that Google likes fresh content. The more regularly you upload content, the more Google likes you, the higher up you appear on any relevant search results, and the more hits you’re likely to get – of which it is hoped that some will turn into clients!
Ah yes, I had rather lost sight of the fresh content angle. I did know that, and lost sight of it. Altho presumably it pushes the blog specifically up the rankings, rather than necessarily the ‘parent’ website generally? Either way, it would certainly explain the repetitive nature of much of the utter shite on vast numbers of blogs, and explains “the point of it all” as far as some bloggers are concerned.
I had been looking at it from the angle of some of personal branding material I’d absorbed lately (establish a field of expertise, keep hitting home a consistent message, and so forth), and was struggling to reconcile that approach with much of what I was seeing (to be fair, in contrast, some blogs do very much fit that personal branding mould). I guess the ideal is to balance both – fresh content to help with rankings plus maintaining the ‘authority and influence’ idea without developing a reputation as an endless recycler of crud.