6 thoughts on “In the blogosphere, everything is immediate. The deadline is now.”

1. The Entrepreneurial Mind

   http://forum.belmont.edu/cornwall/

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2. While taking a math course, I decided to blog on each chapter of the text book in order to help me study. There was nothing further from immediacy–if anything, having a blog that was temporarily dominated by math posts would seem like something that’d drive readers away like the plague.

   Yet my series on Finite Mathematics is one of the biggest reader-magnets (via Google) that my blog has! According to Google Dashboard, some 12% of my readership finds its way to one post in particular in the series.

   If you’re looking for an alternative to Cowen’s “quick and the dead” model, I’d suggest scrolling down to the end of this old Mister Snitch! post, where he talks about the “Long Tail style of blogging”.

   7) The long-tail blogger is the rarest of successful breeds. This style requires consistent blogging over a long period of time (hence the rarity in a fairly new medium). As we have noted in previous posts, blogging is heavily favored by search engines in the current Internet cultural environment. A classic long-tail blogger such as Dustbury gets a very respectable audience (currently approaching 1,000 unique visits a day) because the site has been commenting on popular culture, steadily and succinctly, for over nine and a half years. A look at Charles’ site stats tells the story: Out of every 1,000 hits, about 70% come to the site’s front page or a current post. The remainder are links that trickle in – one, two, three at a time – for archived posts. Charles rarely enters trackback festivals or Carnivals. (Although he was the very first person to send an entry to the very first Carnival of the Vanities, he now submits an entry about once every other week to Outside the Beltway or Wizbang.) His site gets found because the search engines reward authoritative blog posts – and longevity.

   We haven’t been doing this anywhere near as long as Charles. But it’s encouraging to see that simply by writing decently and adding value to links, a blog can, over time, find its audience. Of all the blogging styles (and many blogs, like this one, are a melange of several styles), this seems to be the most natural and satisfying for blogger and reader alike. Fausta is another long-tail blogger whose traffic will grow as she continues to post. Charles, James Lileks (who has some ‘outside celebrity’ backing – see 5, above – but whose 9-year online background suggests he belongs in this category), and Fausta Weiss are the Warren Buffets of blogging.

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3. Thank you very much for your input and these two links.

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4. The Entrepreneurial Mind

   http://forum.belmont.edu/cornwall/

   Reply ↓

5. While taking a math course, I decided to blog on each chapter of the text book in order to help me study. There was nothing further from immediacy–if anything, having a blog that was temporarily dominated by math posts would seem like something that’d drive readers away like the plague.

   Yet my series on Finite Mathematics is one of the biggest reader-magnets (via Google) that my blog has! According to Google Dashboard, some 12% of my readership finds its way to one post in particular in the series.

   If you’re looking for an alternative to Cowen’s “quick and the dead” model, I’d suggest scrolling down to the end of this old Mister Snitch! post, where he talks about the “Long Tail style of blogging”.

   7) The long-tail blogger is the rarest of successful breeds. This style requires consistent blogging over a long period of time (hence the rarity in a fairly new medium). As we have noted in previous posts, blogging is heavily favored by search engines in the current Internet cultural environment. A classic long-tail blogger such as Dustbury gets a very respectable audience (currently approaching 1,000 unique visits a day) because the site has been commenting on popular culture, steadily and succinctly, for over nine and a half years. A look at Charles’ site stats tells the story: Out of every 1,000 hits, about 70% come to the site’s front page or a current post. The remainder are links that trickle in – one, two, three at a time – for archived posts. Charles rarely enters trackback festivals or Carnivals. (Although he was the very first person to send an entry to the very first Carnival of the Vanities, he now submits an entry about once every other week to Outside the Beltway or Wizbang.) His site gets found because the search engines reward authoritative blog posts – and longevity.

   We haven’t been doing this anywhere near as long as Charles. But it’s encouraging to see that simply by writing decently and adding value to links, a blog can, over time, find its audience. Of all the blogging styles (and many blogs, like this one, are a melange of several styles), this seems to be the most natural and satisfying for blogger and reader alike. Fausta is another long-tail blogger whose traffic will grow as she continues to post. Charles, James Lileks (who has some ‘outside celebrity’ backing – see 5, above – but whose 9-year online background suggests he belongs in this category), and Fausta Weiss are the Warren Buffets of blogging.

   Reply ↓

6. Thank you very much for your input and these two links.

   Reply ↓