Fink About It

As christmas is almost over, I’ve changed the winter-edition theme back into my old design. However, I’ve altered it. There is some javascript font-replacement going on, the header and the menu was altered by me and there are some shadows behind the texts which you probably didn’t note until now. These are all alterations due to things you can expect from your blog in 2010:
Read on

When you have a blog you are supposed to write something, right? When you have enough time on your hands to think about what you want to write and how to accomplish it, mostly you don’t have a problem to do so. But it’s your obligation to blog regularly, if you want to establish a core readership. Then it is really hard to not blog about something wrong, just to fill your blog. Here are three things you should not blog about.

I’m not home, so break in, everybody!

Most personal blogs make the mistake to get too personal. They post information about where they live or when they are on holiday. Without asking they publish pictures of their neighbors or friends. The dangers are obvious, when you look at the consequences: Sites get indexed so fast that even if you take off a picture or a post about anybody, people will be able to find it elsewhere¹. And even if you don’t give your address on your blog, people can look up your address by typing in your domain at whois services². So now they have your address – tell them when you’re gone and your new flat screen will be going on a long holiday, too. Read on

1. e.g. the “cached” button in Google [↩]
2. e.g. try and search for any domain here. You will see their actual address. [↩]

In the previous article I told you about ways to improve your blogging. This time it is about how to make blogging popular in general.

Get rid off all them dead blogs

According to the Technorati data there are half a million blogs out there. “Wowie! So blogging is popular. What are you talking about?”, you might fink. Fink again, first because 86% percent of all these blogs are dead blogs. And I am talking about blogging, i.e. the actual posts on a blog, i.e. the frequent updates. What that means is:

Blogging is not popular, but it is popular to open up a blog and not updating it in years.

Hell, I know that is not easy to provide quality content all the time. Twittering is not a solution. Instead try to link to interesting websites (like mine) and get rid off your dead blog.

Don’t say fuck! Say blog!

As I have showed before: Blogging is not very popular. So what to do? I tell ya: We have to make it popular just like Google made Google popular. We simply replace an important word in the language: Read on

The word blog was created by a community. This very same community made it popular amongst other people that let themselves be addicted to the idea of blogging.

People that are addicted to Blogging are called Bloggers.

The question is: “What makes a blogger a blogger?” Firstly, bloggers are not journalists. While journalists have studied writing and a great writing experience, bloggers often start from scratch. In most cases they are not expert writers, but on the other hand they are passionate writers. Blog posts that present bare personal experiences are commented the most.

“Bare personal experiences are commented the most…”

…is not exactly a way to improve your blogging, but it might help others to improve their blogging by commenting on your posts or getting interested in the idea of blogging. This brings me to the second answer you can give on what makes a blogger a blogger: the idea of communication. Whenever people comment on your posts you should be commenting on their comment in order to establish communication with your readers. That is, because they are the instrument to improve your blogging. Tell them to tell you what they think about your way of blogging. You will see that they will react on how you should blog. Just because they are your readers, they will decide on quality over quantity and vice versa. Read on

This is the first post to an article series of 3 very special posts about blogging:

• Why Blogging Is Not Popular (This post)
• Ways to Improve Blogging (coming up this week)
• How to Make Blogging Popular with Just One Word ! (coming up next week)

This is a very special post about blogging and it is a very special post about language. It will show a way in that the word blogging can be made more popular amongst English speakers. Read on