Over the coming weeks, Spark is running a special series about building an online presence you can be proud of. Merlin Mann of 43Folders.com will be our guide, and we encourage you to pick up Merlin’s homework and follow along at home or work.
Last month, Technorati – which is a search engine for blogs – published their 2008 State of the Blogosphere report. And guess what?
There are a lot of blogs.
According to Technorati’s data, more than 175,000 new blogs are created every day. That’s 121 new blogs per minute. So at that rate, in the time it takes you to listen to a single episode of Spark, there are probably about 3281 brand new blogs on the Internet (give or take). And according to Merlin Mann, a handful of those are actually good.
This week, Merlin explains that one of the keys to writing a good blog is identifying your audience:
The best thing you can do for yourself, and for anybody who’s ever going to read what you do, is to really narrow your focus by thinking about who your audience is. Who is it that I think is going to be following what I do, and who specifically do I want to reach with this?
We’ve reposted the audio here as an MP3 download:
Play audio:
Merlin’s homework assignment: Identify 10 humans beings whose names you know that you wish read your blog. Then imagine, imagine if only one person in the entire world read your blog. Who would that be?
Do you agree with Merlin? Completely disagree? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, or better yet, write a response on your own blog and leave a link to it here.
For the most part I do agree with him that there are very few decent, worthwhile blogs. So many are just drivel or worse.
I love the idea of having homework assignments to entice us and give us a call to action so we can actually learn to improve our blogging skills. Great idea and I’ll be paying attention — and doing my homework.
Merlin is right about this one. Though I have had a blog on LiveJournal for several years now, I have been using it primarily as a “diary” for what has been happening on my website.
Unfortunately, I have no way of knowing if anyone has read any of that material or not, and I have actually been off the Internet much more than I have been on the Internet in recent days.
This is in part due to the upgrading of both my desktop and my laptops to Fedora 9 (Linux distribution), and replacing the 120GB hard drive on my desktop with a 320GB hard drive.
I hope to get some new material for “Cybernightlife Founder’s Journal” and my website in general. This is after I spent the past weekend at my alma mater’s homecoming (http://www.valpo.edu), of which that school is celebrating its sesquicentennial.
I am also considering a move to Facebook as a way to gain a new audience (which is currently limited to Linux users).
Obsession is a good word to use. If someone isn’t passionate about their topic then their blog is doomed from the start. This is especially true for corporate bloggers (our area of interest) since an abandoned blog by a company not committed or passionate about their reasons for blogging can be very damaging.
Some great tips in here. We’ll be linking to it in an upcoming blog post on the Out-Smarts blog. Thanks!
@mhairi,
Thanks for the ‘link love’. I always thought that one of the challenges with my own personal blog is finding the time to do it, since I also have a personal podcast, plus my CBC work. I think, though, that my problem is really that I haven’t defined it narrowly enough. If I really thought about what is the specific slice of technology and culture that I’m passionate about but don’t get to talk about on the air, I think I’d be much more motivated; that’s my new strategy.
Nora,
You mentioned that John Mieeta? is the person you’d be thinking of when writing your blog. Can you please share the correct spelling of his name.
thanks,
Thom
@Thom,
Happy to. It’s John Maeda:
http://plw.media.mit.edu/people/maeda/
Hi Nora,
I’m not sure if you know this podcast, Open Source (which is really great), but John Maeda’s been on a couple of times.
Here are the links for his interviews:
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Watson_Institute/Open_Source/RadioOpenSource-John_Maeda_Posters.mp3
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Watson_Institute/Open_Source/RadioOpenSource-John_Maeda.mp3
Best,
Jen
@Jen,
Thanks, I wasn’t familiar with this podcast. I’ll check it out!
I used to write a weekly gardening column in the Morrisburg Leader called The Kitchen Garden – it was really a letter to my dad (I’m a bad correspondent) and I sent him a subscription to the paper.
That really helped me get started, now I find the I target a special young person or a member of Parliament.