Liberal Values Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought

While the blogosphere itself was the major topic of discussion in the blogosphere in response to one post from last week which I commented on here, Felix Salmon gave some additional advice for bloggers on Friday. While discussing reasons for blogging he also warned about the time involved:

It takes up a lot of time, which means that there are significant opportunity costs associated with blogging. If you read a lot of blogs and news outlets anyway, then the marginal extra time commitment can come down, but it’s still substantial.

The last part is what makes it possible for many of us to blog. If I counted all the time reading then the time would sound overwhelming. While still time consuming, it takes far less time to write about material you would read regardless of whether you are blogging.

One question for bloggers is the optimal frequency of posting. I agree wtih Felix on this:

As always, there’s a trade-off between quantity and quality. Should you write more, with lower quality, or less, with higher quality? Fortunately, the blogosphere has been around for long enough that we have a simple empirical answer to this question: given the choice, go for quantity over quality. You might not like it — I certainly don’t — but I defy you to name a really good blogger who doesn’t blog frequently.

Often bloggers are the worst judges of their own work; I can give you hundreds of personal examples of blog entries I thought were really good which disappeared all but unnoticed, and of blog entries I thought were tossed-off throwaways which got enormous traction and distribution. Mostly, blogging is a lottery on the individual-blog-entry level — and if you want to win the lottery, your best chance of doing so is to maximize the number of lottery tickets you buy.

Personally, I’m not very happy about this fact. But it is a fact. And although I might gravitate towards those blogs in my RSS reader which have only one or two unread entries, I know that empirically speaking success in the blogging world is pretty much directly proportional to frequency of output. I thought RSS would change things. It didn’t. Ah well. And don’t worry about time of day, either: people read blogs at the craziest times, so once it’s written just put it up.

Posting several times a day helps build traffic as people are more likely to get in the habit of returning if they believe there will be more material. Receiving links is like a lottery as Felix suggests. Links do not necessarily come to the best blog posts. Sometimes you just get lucky when a larger blog happens to find something in a post and decides to link. Often a post which takes a long time to research and write will receive no links while a brief post which just provides a quick fact receives major links.

Of course blogging is a personal matter. If you only feel like blogging every few days that is your prerogative as long as you don’t mind how this will probably impact readership. Some bloggers do prefer to write one post a day and devote more time to increase its quality. Some of them do develop a following this way, but I suspect it is harder to do.

Comments are a unique aspect of blogs which make them different from opinion columns:

Another necessary quality of any decent conversationalist is that he or she be a good listener. The same goes for blogging — to a very large extent, blogging isn’t writing, it’s reading. I have hundreds of blogs in my RSS reader, I use Google Alerts and other tools to let me know what other people are saying about me, I spend a lot of time reading my comments, and of course I read lots of other blogs avidly. Blogging, certainly the way I do it, is to a large degree about synthesizing information — connecting this news article here to that blog entry there, putting things into context, and making connections. And so although I produce a lot of content, I consume orders of magnitude more.

I like to say that the main difference between bloggers and professional journalists is that while journalists tend to think of a news article as the end of the journalistic process, bloggers tend to think of a blog entry as the beginning of a conversation…

And another part of being generous: leave comments on your own blog, and on other people’s blogs. Doing so is in no way below you.

The discussion in comments can add value to a blog and comments on other blogs can help bring traffic to one’s own blog. Comments are not under the direct control of the blogger as they depend on what others add, but they still must be considered part of the material of a blog and reflect on its overall quality. While some start with the notion that everyone should be allowed to comment freely, bloggers of any size soon learn that it is necessary to weed out both the spammers and the trolls.

An unmoderated comment section can quickly turn into a stream of insults and a shouting match without any coherent discussion. Some bloggers respond by going too far by ending comments altogether, deleting all comments which disagree with them, or limiting comments to a fixed group of like minded people. I would suggest moderation based more on the tone of comments as opposed to restricting disagreement. Definitely beware during political campaigns of those who attack blogs en masse which support a different candidate. Organized attacks of this nature were a particular problem with many of the Ron Paul supporters in 2007 but also occurs to a lesser degree with many other candidates.

Responding to comments also gets back to the issue of time. In earlier blogs before I started this one I would spend far more time debating those with different viewpoints, but ultimately learned this is a poor use of time. This both causes blogging to infringe too much on other matters, and is also not the best use of time allocated to working on a blog. While thousands read a main blog post from RSS readers and syndication, a much smaller number read the comments. While it is worthwhile to spend some time responding in comments, it is a waste of time to engage in lengthy debates. Before getting a paying job as a blogger at The Washington Monthy, Steve Benen ran The Carpetbagger Report. The FAQ includes a sensible policy:

I’m a conservative Republican who disagrees with everything you write. Can I contact you to begin a lengthy debate?

For the love of God, no. I appreciate spirited discourse as much as the next guy, but I’m afraid I’m not looking for a debate opponent right now.

One problem is that such debates never end. Every week there are new people who want to argue that Saddam really did have WMD,  creationism is a sensible alternative to the science of evolution, the scientific consensus on global warming is wrong, abortion is the killing of babies, the Founding Fathers did not really intend for the United States to have separation of church and state,  Barack Obama is not an American citizen, or whatever Fox or Rush Limbaugh is talking about that day is true. It is not worth the time to debate each new person who raises the same arguments, especially as those who hold such beliefs are not likely to change their minds regardless of how strong the facts contradict their views.

I also agree with Felix on this point:

I should mention at this point another one of my slogans: “the object of quality in a blog is not the individual blog entry, it’s the blog itself”. Every so often some meta-media organization decides that it needs to get with the online world and make bloggers eligible for its prizes. There’s invariably an application form of some description, which asks you to present your best blog entries; those blog entries will then be read by the judges to determine which blog is the best.

This is of course ridiculous. There are great bloggers who do little more than link to other people: no one blog entry is worth much at all, but the aggregation and editing function is invaluable.

It is always difficult when asked to provide one blog post for a compilation due to the nature of most blogs. A blog is better judged by the sum of the posts on a topic which will be far better than any individual post. This is especially true when a blog is covering a topic with a series of posts over one or more days.

Another question faced by bloggers is whether to place an entire post in a RSS feed or to use a teaser paragraph to get people to link to your blog. Felix addresses this question:

You’re doing this because you want people to read your work. So make that as easy for them as possible. If they want you to email it to them, email it to them. If they want to read it on Seeking Alpha or Huffington Post, then post it there. If they want to read it in their RSS reader, then make sure you publish a full RSS feed. And if someone else flatters you by copying your stuff, be happy, not angry. You’re not doing this for the pageviews, you’re doing this to be read.

Again I agree. Requiring those who read the RSS feed to click through to read the full post will probably increase traffic but it is more important to be read than to have a higher number of page views. While limiting RSS feeds to teasers will increase the number of page views, others will stop reading the RSS feed at the point where the post ends. They might even drop a blog from a RSS reader if they are not seeing full posts to read.

It is also worthwhile to have posts quoted elsewhere. Of course those doing such quoting should give credit to the original source and link back.