Meta CbN Part 2: Good Blogs Care

Continuing bravely on here with this obsession, but I should add an aside. In the past 2-3 years I’ve learned about a part of website development called content strategy. I love it, and I’ve done some CS work, but I’ve learned the most about what’s important in content strategy (quality content) while writing this blog. It ties into the next three of Merlin’s thoughts:

• Good blog posts are made of paragraphs.
• Good “non-post” blogs have style and curation.
• Good blogs try.

Quality deserves three of Merlin’s bullet points because a blog that doesn’t try to do a good job or want to provide something of value to its readers is a blog whose existence is suspect. I certainly don’t want to read it. Good bloggers create original content and cost the writer time and effort. Good blogs are the product of an actual person’s thoughts and ideas and are that person’s original concept. The content type is immaterial–words, videos, pictures or something else–as long as it’s real stuff someone came up with for that blog. A good blog is a creative product and process all on its own.

Why do I care? Because I’m participating in the Internet, and in blogging, and by reading this so are you, and I care about both of us, and I care that you and I are sometimes poorly served by some of the Internet’s content.

I’m fascinated by the possibilities of this gigantic collaborative communications forum called the Internet. I think future historians will go nuts over the implications and consequences of this thing. I think having millions of voices contributing billions of largely censorship free and interest-driven links, tidbits, journals and conversations to one giant, collective, easily-accessible repository is powerful. It’s a forum as yet mostly un-mediated by any authority and largely independent of the boundaries of any political entity. People can opine, express and persuade one another directly, without a journalistic filter. We inspire, amaze, are radical, traditional. We share and adapt and create collectively. The internet is the biggest, most gossipy, fickle and judgmental, most human expression of collective humanity I’ve ever seen. It’s awesome.

It’s also hungry for good content. By “good” I don’t mean that grammar/spelling gurus, religious/political authorities, or your 3rd grade teacher approved it. I don’t mean it has to be serious or even very coherent. I mean that it is original, interest-driven content that provides value to someone else. Even if that value is someone listening to you and taking the time to disagree with you about your opinion on level 3 warlocks in a sub-forum of a gaming community. Heck, the lolcat meme is silly fun, but I go back to it when I have a bad day, and it makes thousands of people laugh. That’s value.

Many people throw junk at the internet. They hope it gets them money, followers, or both, but they don’t want to give anything of value back to their audience. PR hacks think blogs are the 21st century tool to keep themselves in business and keep selling you stuff, even if it’s bad for you. Affiliate marketers con you into thinking you’re reading a real review when it’s a paid person with 10 logins spamming Amazon. Some newspapers think regurgitating already-published material into a blog saves their bacon with the young people. Business owners start ghost-written blogs neatly packaged by the Corporate Communications department. People “game” membership sites to get more followers they care nothing about. Website owners don’t understand their unrelated, obnoxious advertising is part of their content too. I could go on.

The internet = content, and a lot of it is junk. I write these articles, and this blog in general, because it’s my thing, part of my contribution, to something I care about. And if you think about it, what I care about isn’t the internet itself, it’s the people on the internet. I care that bloggers, and other people, are putting good content into this collective thing and yet reaping junk from people who don’t respect them or understand what all this internet stuff is about. A blog isn’t a business bandwagon to jump on, it’s a platform for unique, creative content.

So. Write well. Write often. Care. Even if what you write isn’t a masterpiece, the effort really does matter.

Meta CbN Part 1: Making a Good Blog

Merlin Mann wrote a post called “What Makes for a Good Blog?” last August 2008, and I liked what he had to say. I found the post again recently, and wondered if I fit the criteria here at CbN. Since I’m going to be packing and not crafting as I prepare to move in the next 2 weeks, I’m going to get a little meta on you. I’m going to put this blog through the wringer of Merlin’s thoughts about what a good blog is. After all, if it’s no good, what’s the point? Part 1 commences.

• Good blogs have a voice (Try Being Interesting).
  

When I find an interesting-looking blog, I stick it in my feed reader. The reader strips the blog of its formatting, sidebars, whirlygigs, doo-dahs and furbelows and turns it into pure content. If, after 2 weeks of reading pure content, I can’t remember why the heck I added the blog in the first place or who that person is, I delete it from the reader. To keep a blog, the writing or photographic or whatever style of a blog must stand out enough to remind me me who writes it and what sort of blog they’re writing.

I hope my peculiarities are evident, that when people get to me in their own readers, they can distinguish me from the potted plant in the corner. I don’t know how you see it, as my own voice is rather distinct in my head, but I certainly don’t try to bland myself up. I admit CbN is not my whole self, but I don’t think that diminishes the me I put here.

• Good blogs reflect focused obsessions (Almost nuts, but without digression).
  

That’s definitely the case here at CbN. I am obsessed with making stuff, because it’s my creative outlet, and I literally do it at night after work. I don’t focus on any particular craft, because learning is as important to me as making. I may seem to digress sometimes, but everything I put here is at some level about being creative in the time that belongs to me. Posting about crocheting is easy, but often vacation is relevant also, such as when I had the overwhelming urge to cook when I learned my dog was sick at home. Crafting is my outlet, in a way that my other obsessions like science fiction or medieval history are not. Crafting is what snuck past the hobby border, whispered over the obsession line and right into to I-can’t-live-without-it Land.  I have to make stuff in order to be sane.

• Good blogs are the product of “Attention times Interest. (Where’s your story arc?)
  

I think he means that a blog should show a progression over time or development in the subject matter. If it’s written by a real person with actual thoughts, it should be following some unknown trajectory through sharing the owner’s interests, the metamorphosis of their particular obsessions, and what inspired and encouraged them along the way.

I try to do this. I post my inspirations, my process, the struggles, the disappointments, the weird stuff, the mistakes and the finished products. Creativity is a process of  turning previously unrelated items into something new, and I’m very interested in how that happens for myself and others. My favorite craft blogs show that process, and I want to show mine here. I don’t have any cliffhangers, but hopefully there’s still a bit of wondering what comes next.

I posted about the birches quilt many times, not to bore anyone to tears, but so I could show it was more than the finished product. It was my second purely decorative, expressive textile piece. The subject was a memory, the materials had stories of their own, and it was produced through a long creative process impacted by my experiences and thoughts over the time I made it. I wanted to document that.

Over a longer arch, my craft skills have improved since I began, and I have new interests, goals and ideas in my life. I don’t post about the same things I once did, I’ve shared painful losses, kitten adoptions, my imminent move. I am planning the 2nd reinvention of this blog soon to reflect where I am now.

Next up – more questions …

Blogoversary

I made my first post a year ago today on this blog, and I had ideas about things to say: what kind of impact keeping this online journal has had on my life, things I’ve learned, things I’ve done, etc. etc. And I don’t have them to say today, because I am not quite feeling it today, you know? My eyes are puffy, and I miss my cat, and that’s life at the moment.

While I’m on the subject, I want to thank all of you who left comments today and yesterday. Jeff and I both really appreciate all of you taking the time to stop by and leave a message. It’s been a crappy day, and you guys have really been a bright spot. Really, I can’t say how much I appreciated your messages.

You know, ironically, the events of the past day and my subsequent bloggy malaise are the very type of thing that’s made keeping this blog such an unusual and rewarding experience. You can’t plan life. It does what it wants to do, and I find myself on many days sort of trying to surf along, or sometimes sort of dog-paddling along, figuring it all out as I go. And when you keep a journal about life, sometimes the blog ends up doing what it feels like too by necessity.

So I’m beginning a new year not with plans and pithy editorializing, but with just me and my life. Just hanging out here on the internet, talking about what’s going on, and the things I do, and hopefully making a few connections with folks out there along the way.

And in many ways I think this halfway coherent post, this few sentences were the result of the latest curveball life has had to offer me, has ended up being the most appropriate blogoversary post I could have made. I’m not running the New York Times here after all … I’m running a journal here about an unplanned journey.