Blog Day and the Writer

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.