Category: "Blog media"

Web evolution: make your posts shorter!

Web evolution: make your posts shorter!

Do you remember the days where you'd carefully read through everything your RSS aggregator collected for you? Do you still do that? Do you even open your RSS aggregator? Do you even use one?

Chances are you're using twitter by now. 140 characters max per tweet. And you don't even read them all! You just skim through them.

Way too much information of course.

And yet, many people still write incredibly long blog posts with fancy writing & diluted content. Even bloggers who tweet their posts to twitter. They should know better... I don't want to point at anyone in particular; just click on the averag elink in twitter and see if you want to read all that text... :p

I'm willing to bet that 95+% of the people who click through from twitter to a blog post do not read that post in its entirety. We have to make those posts shorter!

Anil Dash about blogging

I recently heard Anil Dash put it in this very simple way:

"A blog is a way to connect with people you care about."

And it has nothing to do with technology, feeds, etc.

It's quite another approach compared to my own (alternative) definition of blogging and the flaw would probably be that it can be applied to many other things as well (forums, IM, MySpace, etc.) Still, I like it. It kind of makes sense to look at blogs in this social way.

Furthermore, Anil would explain that we hardcore bloggers tend to think that most people would like to talk to hundreds of thousands of people through their blog. Actually, most of them don't! They regard us as somewhere between strange and psychopath. (And I do remember my girlfriend having that exact same reaction when I first told her about my blog... :roll:)

My (alternative) definition of blogging

How do people usually define blogging?

They tend to say that it's about organizing posts by reverse chronological order. That it's about writing in the first person. That's it's about being more personal. That's it's a social thing. That it's about personal sites.

Yeah right. Like we had no news sites before? No forums with personal opinions before? No personal home pages before? No discussion boards before?

To me, the main difference blogging makes is this:

  • Before blogging, all kinds of people tended to talk about a specific subject in a specific place (forum, mailing list).
  • After blogging, a specific person tends to talk about all kinds of subjects in a specific place (his personal blog).

This central paradigm shift now triggers a series of changes all other the web: we need trackback & aggregators to replace discussion threads & forums. We need new website ranking algorythms based on more complex criterias than inbound links alone. We have new forms of (referer, comment...) spam to cope with...

Then... comes collaborative blogging... where bloggers unite their efforts to publish a multi-authored blog. This then very much looks like an old-school news site or forums. Well it's still clearly different from forums since the authors are limited/selected and the new guy can only post in the comments section.

But as far as news sites are concerned, I'm not sure there really is a difference with what existed before... Maybe it's just easier than before to set up the tools needed for collaborative publishing. (Well, with b2evolution it certainly is! ;D)

Fame! (The illusion of)

Every blogger gets to do that once in a lifetime (ahem, I mean at least once...): I searched for my firstname in search engines...

Surprisingly or not (depending on how much you know about web indexing techniques), I am famous, very very famous!

  • #1 François in the world out of about 6,450,000 on yahoo.com
  • #2 François in the world out of about 3,310,000 on google.com

What more could I ask for?

Real fame? nah... I just hope those rankings last long enough for me not to look stupid when you read this :p (Those rankings can actually change on a daily basis, so... yeah maybe cyberfame just works like real fame, one day you're at the top, the next day you're gone...)

Google & BlogNoise: the blogger's responsiblity

We have talked about the annoying BlogNoise problem before. And most bloggers have agreed that Google would probably be smart enough to fix the problem shortly in order to provide a better service to their users.

A great part of the BlogNoise is generated by the fact alone that we - bloggers - have so many unrelated posts/subjects on the same web page. And when we - bloggers - link to each other, we let the indexing robots follow these links and then index a lot of crap at the other end. This is because, most of the time, the permalinks we refer to, just point right into the middle of a monthly archive page with so many different subjects!

I have suggested a technical google-side solution using RSS, but the more I think about it, the more I am getting convinced that it is not Google's job to fix this! It is rather our bloggers' duty to fix this!

We have created crap on the Internet; now we just have to clean up!

The blogger-side solution is actually quite simple: all we need to do is stop using permalinks pointing right into the middle of monthly archives! We need to make the permalinks point to single posts (possibly with comments and trackback). This way, when someone refers to the post, and later the indexing robot follows the link, it will only index a single post. And all the keywords being indexed will actually be related to that post! No more indexing soup mixing hundreds of unrelated keywords from dozens of unrelated posts!

Still, some questions remain:

  • What happens with the old permalinked posts?
  • How do we exclude navigation from indexing? (this is actually a general question about indexing the web)
  • And last but not least: Do bloggers actually want clean indexing? Or rather, do they prefer to continue flattering themselves with all those illegitimate search-result-hits that so easily rocket up their monthly hit counts? And it's even better when you consider unique visitors!

    Let me add that this is very contradictory with another typical blogger trend stating, in the name of interoperability and public's interest, that the only valid markup is the latest XHTML DTD!

PS: I like interop. I like standards. I am doing my best to support them. And I AM working on cleaning up my permalinks. I'll get less google hits... but hits don't matter! What you want from now on is increasing your google-hit satisfaction ratio! You want no more visitors coming to your blog by mistake! :P