Helmut here. Back in the US. I have to say once again thanks to my pal Barba for the great blogging during the past several weeks. He has helped make this what I think is a damn good blog. We'll give him a break with the courseload and end of the semester, but demand his continuation. I've really enjoyed reading his posts when I've had the chance (and thinking, "damn, that's good stuff"). Thanks also to Flaco and Rollo for their contributions.
We're running a little blog here that still has a fairly low readership. I don't know why. The content is really good. Barba has shown this. The photos are obviously excellent. We have a nice core of smart and loyal readers. The comments are consistently good, and we've managed to avoid the loudmouthed nonsense in much of the comments on other blogs. So, all good, and we're building.
More soon on Venezuela....
7 comments:
I'll agree with all points in the post.
Thanks, Eric. And, Rollo, I agree to some extent. The readership has dropped by about 50% (well, from a not so high point in the first place) and I think that's really unfair to Barba. I just don't understand why. The thing about readership for me is not to get the loudmouthed club going, but to have enough readers where there's a real sharing of ideas and motivation to write for a large enough bunch of people. In the early days of this blog, when I was writing for about ten people, motivation was very difficult. I knew most of the readers anyway and figured I could just talk with them. Readership boomed with the help of other blogs. Now it has dropped again. I'm basically just expressing my perplexity with blogdom. Mark at Norwegianity probably has the best explanation -- the big blogs cornered the market early on. Regardless of quality (some are rightfully well-read, others are crap), those big blogs are the opnes people come back to.
I think for a small blogger to attract a large audience these days, you have to really gear your writing toward other blogs. You have to restrain your creativity and direct your posts toward other blogs and the hot topics in the blogosphere.
This blog is still a daily stop for me, in part because the posts are intellectual and genuine rather than "this blog said this and that blog said that".
One of the best methods I've found for expanding readership is to comment on other blogs.
Given the amount of time I spend talking to students about the importance of writing to a real audience, one of the ironies of the whole blog experience for me--and it was pretty much totally new--has been the difficulty of understanding just who the audience is, not just of Phronesisaical, but of any blog. I mean, if it's preaching to the choir, why does the choir bother to click the bookmark? And, surely, there are readers like Elyas Bakhtiari who are looking for what Phronesisaical aims to do, which seems to be to kind of ask the choir to think about why they're standing there at all, hymnals open.
But who is that audience? And how do you write to/for everyone else who happens to drop by for a bit of perspectival affirmation? That's the tough part . . .
By the way, I didn't mean to say that the photos are excellent and then wedge the post between two of my own photos. I'm talking about guys who take real photos, like Wray-McCann, Selvin Chance, Ian Maguire, etc.
About the last few comments, I agree. There's a problem with dialogue when we all think similar thoughts. Good dialogue requires some conflict. I'm trained as a philosopher, which means you try to examine all facets of an argument in order to tinker with it and make it better or reject it as unsatisfactory. In the Land of Blog, it seems that the biggies are clubs of like-minded thinkers. We have a somewhat similar gang here -- both contributors and readers -- but I don't think that's the whole story. I know that there are people who vehemently disagree with a lot of what I have to say who are nonetheless faithful readers of the blog. I'm heartened by this.
Elyas is right. Commenting on other blogs is the way to get more readership. I've tried that for that very reason. It's pretty unsatisfying unless there's really truly good stuff -- Neddie Jingo, among others, does a good job of writing creative and poignant stuff. I admire his devotion. But the biggies mostly report the news from their perspective. I like Atrios because he has a good sense for what's important, but I find his blog frustrating because he basically says a couple lines and then links. Very little labor involved and he has gazillions of readers. I also like Kos, but I really dislike the un-self-critical tone and occasional screechiness of Daily Kos. Joining the comment-on-other-blogs circle smells of the tart-blog. We try not to be blog-tarts here, even if we admire tartdom in non-virtual life (I shouldn't say this -- both I and Barba are married).
Contrary to some of my own philosophical positions, I try to get my students to write to a neutral view-from-nowhere audience -- the anonymous kind that might be reading their work in a journal. I'm not sure that's the way to go about a blog.
I think that, in the end, I would be very pleased if Phronesisaical was known as generally progressive, but not in any typical "progressive blog" way. If progressives suffer from a major malady, it's self-righteousness (the kind they disdain in their rightist counterparts). If Phronesisaical appealed to fairly catholic readers who couldn't quite figure out where we're coming from, I'd feel like we're doing a good job.
A writer chasing an audience is like a dog chasing a car -- there's no point if there is no plan about what to with it. It seems as though the goals here are not to become media celebrities or make a huge profit, so it might be best not to look for a large audience but to let the right size audience find you. This takes some time, of course, especially if you are not planning on doing a lot of promotion.
My site has been going for just over a year, and it's focused on the nichiest of niche topics (Balkan sociology, anyone?). It took several months before it began to get more than 50 visits a day, on average, and now it seems to be reaching a stable readership of around 100 a day. So it is still a small blog, but the people who follow it make up a fair proportion of the people around the world who care about the topic, or at least enough so that there is some potential for feedback, and not everyone agrees with me. So it's all very modest, but it is an outlet, an alternative to some of the more ideological sources out there, and a way of keeping track of what I have been reading. Considering that it is a source of a little satisfaction and a nice way to answer the question of what I am up to, and that it has not cost me a cent (or made me one), that is not too bad. Yes, there is the possibility of trying to follow the scandal of the day or trying to develop a close identification with one or another political group, but if I succeeded at that I would probably lose interest. So I would advise you to keep doing what you are doing.
That's a great analogy, Eric, about the dog and car, and you're right about the goals here, I think; but when I said I didn't really understand the audience, I meant it in regards to reader attrition (not audience development). I mean, I wasn't really hoping to do Phronesisaical any big favors (I feel, as you do, that a small group of intelligent and dedicated readers--and yours are nothing if not dedicated!--is great). What Helmut really wants, it seems, is the thinking part of Jon Stewart's audience. Hell, that may just be a hundred, hundred-fifty.
This is where commenting is helpful--not in the sense of "tart blogging" (ladies: I am not--technically--married). But getting comments from readers like Eric and Elyas and Volney help bloggers to sharpen their understanding of their audience. Not, importantly, so that they can tailor their posts ideologically; but so that they might understand where the chords are thematically, and--perhaps more importantly--stylistically.
It's an interesting question. I'll definitely be talking about blogging and audience in my next composition classroom.
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