Given the very personal, voice rich and decloaked nature of writing your own blog, many of the challenges in sustaining a blog for the long run can be themselves be grounded in the fact that you are so personally invested in it :
1. Since its a one man job (mostly) your own personal circumstances, mood and availablilty all combine to impinge and sway your mood, output and or frequency compared with if you were a small cog in a bigger wheel operation, where there's a momentum to carry you on your off days/weeks/months.
2. Meta blogging; wild and often deeply philosophical tangential discussions and debates about the new medium, the social or professional effects of it, and so on are, in essence, off-topic (though fantastically interesting in themselves) and can indirectly serve to distract and undermine your core focus and move the focus away from the core value proposition you're supposed to be writing about in the first place.
3. You need buckets of passion first and foremost. And this cannot be affected, it needs to actually be in you. Closely followed by conviction and discipline.
4. Don't focus too much on the creation of attention seeking posts or topics in order to rapidly build or an audience. In the short term you may be able to sustain this approach and drive up traffic and create a healthy debate around your site and topics, but it's very hard to sustain this for any period of time (especially if you're a one mand band or small team) and an ultimately temporary surge in activity, posting, comments and traffic is only going to depress you a month down the line when everyone's moved on. Also be prepared for active members of your audience or the community around your blog to disappear of the face of the planet without warning and never come back. Easy to mistake the fickle and fragile nature of the medium for people actually switching off to you personally.
People drift about.
Greg Balanko-Dickson
· 3 years ago
Gary makes a good point, people do drift about. I have also noticed that people are attracted by and comment on specific topics that fit into their specific interests.
Jack Yan
· 3 years ago
Very true, Dennis. I got into blogging to get stuff off my chest, but there are simply days when I don’t have the same passion about the day’s issues. And I get busy some days so I have to stop blogging. Journos cannot afford to have moods and use these excuses if they want their pay cheque; they also have to do continual research whereas a lot of bloggers write from what they have internalized. Therefore, some of the news on OhmyNews.com (and its English counterpart) are not of major events, because these are written by people who adopt a journalistic persona yet might not have access (in some cases) to the same sources. Gary is right on the drifters: I blogged about the Muslim cartoons because things annoyed me there, and got a lot of hits. Now I’m back to my own topics, and the drifters have, by and large, gone. So I have a choice: do I want the drifters, in which case I repeat the stories from the mainstream media—and essentially become coopted by them—or do I pursue my own authentic voice? The latter feels more real to me, and it helps break the idea that, despite 24-hour news channels and a proliferation of media, only seven stories ever circulate the planet at any one time.
All Comments
Given the very personal, voice rich and decloaked nature of writing your own blog, many of the challenges in sustaining a blog for the long run can be themselves be grounded in the fact that you are so personally invested in it :
1. Since its a one man job (mostly) your own personal circumstances, mood and availablilty all combine to impinge and sway your mood, output and or frequency compared with if you were a small cog in a bigger wheel operation, where there's a momentum to carry you on your off days/weeks/months.
2. Meta blogging; wild and often deeply philosophical tangential discussions and debates about the new medium, the social or professional effects of it, and so on are, in essence, off-topic (though fantastically interesting in themselves) and can indirectly serve to distract and undermine your core focus and move the focus away from the core value proposition you're supposed to be writing about in the first place.
3. You need buckets of passion first and foremost. And this cannot be affected, it needs to actually be in you. Closely followed by conviction and discipline.
4. Don't focus too much on the creation of attention seeking posts or topics in order to rapidly build or an audience. In the short term you may be able to sustain this approach and drive up traffic and create a healthy debate around your site and topics, but it's very hard to sustain this for any period of time (especially if you're a one mand band or small team) and an ultimately temporary surge in activity, posting, comments and traffic is only going to depress you a month down the line when everyone's moved on. Also be prepared for active members of your audience or the community around your blog to disappear of the face of the planet without warning and never come back. Easy to mistake the fickle and fragile nature of the medium for people
actually switching off to you personally.
People drift about.
Therefore, some of the news on OhmyNews.com (and its English counterpart) are not of major events, because these are written by people who adopt a journalistic persona yet might not have access (in some cases) to the same sources.
Gary is right on the drifters: I blogged about the Muslim cartoons because things annoyed me there, and got a lot of hits. Now I’m back to my own topics, and the drifters have, by and large, gone. So I have a choice: do I want the drifters, in which case I repeat the stories from the mainstream media—and essentially become coopted by them—or do I pursue my own authentic voice? The latter feels more real to me, and it helps break the idea that, despite 24-hour news channels and a proliferation of media, only seven stories ever circulate the planet at any one time.