Blog Day and the Writer 31/08/2005 John Evans of Syntagma has posted about Blog Day, although he would prefer to call it Blogosphere Day. He then goes on to consider what has happened within the blogosphere over the last twelve months and it makes interesting reading.I wondered what this Blog Day was all about, so I followed John's link to the Blog Herald article on it. This turns out to be a development of the conversation between Duncan Riley (the Blog Herald) and Robert Scoble on defining the blogosphere. Duncan makes many good points in his post but I particularly liked this statement:So this Blog Day, together we stand, one blogosphere, many lists, and a magic space where even a lad of modest means living in country Western Australia can take on Microsoft’s very own uber-blogger, and maybe even have a shot of winning an argument.Makes you go all gooey, doesn't it?But it doesn't get us much closer to understanding what this Blog Day is all about. In true detective style, I followed yet another link and found this, from which it appears that it was all started by an Israeli guy named Nir Ofir. And this is how he describes what he wants to see happening on Blog Day:In one long moment on August 31st, bloggers from all over the world will post a recommendation of 5 new Blogs, preferably blogs different from their own culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, blog surfers will find themselves leaping and discovering new, unknown blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers. (edited slightly for reasons that might become clear)Now this is a noble effort and I claim the sprinkling of links throughout this post as my part in assisting it. But I cannot help noticing that others are taking a rather different view of Blog Day, preferring to talk of the blogosphere itself and where it might be heading. I confess that this is where my interest lies too, although I am particularly concerned about what it means to the writer.Recently I came across a learned article in the Search Engine Journal that seems good news for writers. The author of the article, Joel Walsh, is pointing out that many of the criteria previously thought important in achieving high rankings with the search engines do not turn out to be relevant at all when examining the top web pages. He has found that the common denominator between the highest ranked pages and blogs is good content written well. Consider what he has to say about spelling and grammar:Spelling and grammar: few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word’s check feature, and then ruling out words marked as misspellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary. Google almost certainly has better access to new words than the dictionary, with its database of billions of web pages. Supposed grammatical errors that did not in fact violate style rules were also ignored. Google would certainly be less conservative than a grammar checker in evaluating popular stylistic devices such as sentence fragments.The whole article is very revealing and, I think, should be recommended reading for any writer with a blog. It means that writers have a natural advantage when it comes to producing blogs of note. We need to be aware of this and concentrating our efforts on producing good, original content that is grammatically sound and without misspellings. This is our field, after all, and the old chatty, diary style is no longer a valid option for any writer who wants to showcase his or her abilities.Writers have an opportunity to affect the future of the blogosphere through their writing. But this will only happen if they are aware of what is happening in the medium and use it to their advantage. Not only will writers' blogs become more important as time goes on but opportunities for paid work will increase as large sites begin to realize they need better content, better edited.Many writers do not have the time or interest to keep track of the blogosphere and this is why we have set up the Writers Blog Alliance. It is intended to watch trends and developments within blogging so that writers can benefit most effectively from them. Individually, we may not be able to have much impact through blogging but collectively we become a potentially powerful force.So I see writers having more influence in the blogosphere of the future and this is how it should be. The language of the blogs is text, first and foremost, and any writer worthy of the name should be completely at home with that.
Clive
Mad Fascina.... Zzzzzz Date Added: 31/08/2005
Gone Away .oO(That's mah boy!) Date Added: 31/08/2005
John (SYNTAGMA) You're absolutely right, Clive, there's a lot of interesting ideas going around now. The blogosphere is never boring, even in August! One thing I've been emphasizing today is that mainstrean media is now blogging breaking news. They're all at it. Since jounalists are professional writers, this means that blogs are becoming the writers' architecture of choice for conveying instant information about fast-moving events. That has been on the cards for some time, but no-one quite took it seriously. Now we know it's true. Personal media is overtaking the mainstream. So, yes, Google is right to insist on professional writing standards on the web. And you are right to highlight this as an opportunity for writers to shine online. Shine away, Clive! :-) Date Added: 31/08/2005
Gone Away Oh, I intend to, John! But, although we've been aware for some time that the news blogs are becoming influential and beginning to force the traditional media to become involved, I think we shouldn't lose sight of the opportunities available to the non-journalist writer. I am quite certain that there is a market for more substantial and longer term writing as well. In time we will develop that market and, perhaps, become the snooty end of the blogosphere. ;) Date Added: 31/08/2005
Robotnik The thing is, as exponentially-growing as it is, the "Blogosphere" is really just another medium for half-assers, mediocre, wanna-be artists and writers to flex their ego muscles. I've found that over 95% of the stuff out there is complete and utter shite. Whether political, social, editorial, and otherwise. Why do you think these people are blogging and not writing for the editorial page of the NY Times, or for the New Yorker or (insert any other prominent paper/magazine in here). It's wading through the sea of garbage that takes time--something many of us don't have. Because there is some quality work out there...but so little, and so hard to get to. Date Added: 31/08/2005
Gone Away I would not disagree, Aleks, but I view that as an opportunity, not a reason to give up on the thing. And I suspect that you're the same, since you're still blogging (interesting that you should be commenting on mine while I was away commenting on yours). ;) Date Added: 31/08/2005
ME Strauss Fabulous post, Clive. Timely and informative. I agree with you, John, about writing standards. The person who always wants balance asks, Who should be the one who *gets to pick* so to speak? Clive said: Makes you go all gooey, doesn't it? I read Duncan's article and even sappy old me didn't go gooey. But if you're talking about your articleand your research--He has found that the common denominator between the highest ranked pages and blogs is good content written well.--the answer is MOST CERTAINLY gooey. Date Added: 31/08/2005
Gone Away Yayyyy, Liz - maybe the writers stand a chance after all! Date Added: 31/08/2005
Josh Well, being the semantics nazi that I am, I found some of his suggestions almost heretical, to be honest. The link seems to be down at the moment, but from memory, I recall him saying that because the "five most popular" sites used crap like "javascript enabled links" and "no heading tags" etc. that it is perfectly acceptable to ignore structural semantics simply because--in summation of what I garnered from his point--google manages it for you. Bollocks. Perhaps I read it wrong, but what he seems to be intimating is that its okay to do a halfassed job of building and maintaining a web page, as long as your content is interesting. To that I reiterate this point, so often discarded by bloggers: If you aren't willing to put in the 5 minutes it takes to check the structure of your document, you aren't really serious about improving the "blogosphere", which is as much about the medium as it is about the content. These things are two parts of an indivisible whole. Date Added: 31/08/2005
Gone Away I think you may have taken what he's saying too much to heart, Josh. I didn't assume that, because he says that content seems to be the most important thing that the top blogs have in common, we can therefore ignore everything else. I'm sure that the design of a web page is still extremely important in gaining attention from the search engines (and I, for one, detest java and the loading time it requires). It will always be true that the actual construction of a site is very important. But pardon my little leap for joy to find that Google actually takes some note of the quality of writing, too. ;) Date Added: 31/08/2005
Josh I know its a bit of a red herring to most, but the semantic web is a worthy goal. Imagine how cool the web would be if everyone used markup as intended. Information would be a hell of a lot easier to find, good content would really stand on its own, and the mung Google has to wade through when indexing the web would not cost it the overhead involved in such a task--not to mention the brainpower that would be set free if Google's engineers weren't constantly worried about staying a step ahead of influential but somewhat irresponsible companies like, yeah, you guessed it, Microsoft. The good news is, however, that things are moving in the right direction -- so getting into the habit of correctly formatting your writing for the web and generally being an upstanding 'sphere citizen will stand you in good stead for the future. Date Added: 31/08/2005
Gone Away We hear and obey, Josh! And you are quite right about a certain company whose name begins with an M and ends with a T - for years they have hijacked other company's good inventions by copying them and then adding a bit of their own so that nothing else is compatible with it. We all dislikes them most positively, yes we does! And with you to guide us in the paths of good 'sphere citizenship, how can we go wrong? :) Date Added: 31/08/2005
ME Strauss Good writing is a balance of structure and expression. Structure gives credibility to the message. Without the message the structure has nothing to hold up. Josh, your goals are noble, but years in publishing tell me that I couldn't even get a group of anal-rententive editors to follow ALL of the rules rigorously. What often happens is once you get people to focus on structure, they start forgetting to edit the content and vice versa. Getting both right requires significant time or a schizoform disorder. :) Granted you speak of people who just don't care. The universe of users is large and the technology changes so quickly. So there will always be a need for structural help. Date Added: 01/09/2005
Gone Away You must remember too, Liz, that Josh speaks of web standards. And the web is the battleground for all sorts of conflicting interests, some of which do not even admit that there are such things as rules... ;) Date Added: 01/09/2005
Gary Veeeeeeedy intelesting. Date Added: 01/09/2005
Gone Away Ach so! Date Added: 01/09/2005
Josh A paragraph tag, a paragraph tag. My kingdom for a paragraph tag. Date Added: 01/09/2005
Gone Away Well, they're there, Josh, but Mad throws a fit if ya use em... ;) Date Added: 01/09/2005
Jodie Clive, it really does feel like we're on the edge of some kind of writing explosion. :) It will be fun to see what happens with it over the next 5 to 10 years. Date Added: 01/09/2005
Gone Away It'll take that long, Jodie? Dunno if I'll still be around then... ;) Date Added: 01/09/2005
Josh Yes, because he's gone out of his way to help the good folks who comment here by wrapping the comment in a paragraph. Makes sense, but it is risky whiskey. Doesn't take much to have a blowout--an unpleasant reality I am currently jousting with while building the WBA aggregator. Maybe that's why I'm being such a bastard about standards thesedays; They really make my life a lot easier. I'm tellin' ya, coping with Google Adsense scripts inside RSS feeds is enough to make a man cry. :P Date Added: 01/09/2005
Gone Away Risky indeed; it only takes one clever dick to stick in a paragraph and Mad gets annoyed again. Amazing it doesn't happen more often, really. It's a bit over the top to stick Adsense inside the feeds isn't it? Can't you just rip em out and say it came apart in your hands, mom...? Date Added: 01/09/2005
Josh Yep. In fact, I made no effort whatsoever to preserve them. I was a little pissed to find out that Google allows such an abomination in the first place. It would be exceedingly easy to rip out all HTML, but that does two things: it penalizes those who cared enough to format information correctly, and it makes everything into a godawful glob of text. If we were talking about this 5 years from now when servers will be able to cope with the overhead of re-formatting text on the fly, it wouldn't be an issue -- but for now adding a bunch of server overhead to an already cycle-intensive thing like expat parsing an XML document is just not practical. Anyways, enough out of me, I have WBA on the brain again. Date Added: 01/09/2005
Madmin Yeah I'm still considering how to deal with the whole paragraph issue. It was logical to wrap comments in paragraphs so I did. Then I realised that it was too much to ask commenters who wanted a new paragraph to close the paragraph with </p>, and open the new one with <p> and also remember not to close the last paragraph (because I already have). So as an interim I asked people to use line break tags to simulate paragraphs (sorry, yes it's a nasty presentational hack but hey I use MS tools so I'm used to it!). This solution has been annoying me for ages because invariably someone will use old school line break tags "<br>" or just throw paragraph tags around anyway (and uppercase at that!). In the end the solution is to ban HTML from comments and parse the comment for line breaks etc and programmaticaly form the XHTML myself... Right now though, I just don't have the time. Date Added: 01/09/2005
John (SYNTAGMA) Robotnik, many are! I've written for the Sunday Times, Daily Mail, various glossy magazines, TV, radio, books, plays ... you name it. The Primary blogosphere seems to be where you're looking. Try the Tertiary one and you may be in business. Date Added: 01/09/2005
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