JOURNAL. THE AMATEUR BLOGGER'S AMATEUR CORNER.
To distract myself from my distress over recent events, I spent a lot of time last night reading up on blogging, searching for new blogs to read, and just generally educating myself.
1. Advice on Promoting Your Blog (someone else's advice, not mine)
I am such an amateur that I really don't understand a lot of the advice I've received and am acting on faith. For example, a friend who doesn't blog but who seems to know a lot about it directed me to Blogflux.com. I don't think I fully appreciated what a good tool Blogflux is, but I like it so much that I've listed it on my big page o' links here (where I not only provide the link, but also a brief description of it). At Blogflux, you can do something called 'pinging'---i.e., notifying various services that you are updating your blog---to a number of important sites. I'm not sure what these sites do, exactly; pI guess they are directories.
Anyway, pinging them by pinging BlogFlux (ping ping ping) apparently gets the word out into the void that you exist or something; I'm not really sure actually, except that it's a sort of cyber EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT. Actually, the more I try to explain it the less I'm sure how it works. It's supposed to 'promote' the website, and I am not even sure yet I want my site promoted, but I always ping Blogflux now when I update my blog. I really don't know why. I do seem to get a bit more traffic these days and my "Google page ranking" as shown at BlogFlux is 5 (and I don't know whether that's good or bad, really, but it's better than 0).
That's another thing that Blogflux will do for you: you can find out your Google page ranking and then, if you can get the little Blogflux HTML thingie to work in your template---naturally I couldn't---everyone ELSE can see your page ranking too. That's assuming that you want them to, of course. If it's 0, you probably don't.
Furthermore, it has a directory where you can list your Blog, a search engine that lets you find blogs that you might be interested in, and other interesting tools. Someone who knows what he or she is doing could doubtless REALLY benefit from this site.
After reading everything at Blogflux and fixing a problem that kept this blog from appearing in their directory, I did some reading about google and google page rankings that I didn't understand at all during which I learned about something called a 'social bookmarking page.' I still don't really understand what they are for, but I plan to register at one called Digg because it sounds interesting. Here's what the description says: "Digg is all about user powered content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that's important to you!" I was attracted to the site by the administrator's liberal use of the word "digg"---e.g., if you 'digg' an article and vote for it, it and other articles you have dugg are 'promoted' (whatever this means) to the front page of the site....I don't know.
Remember Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd as the ' two wild and ker-razy guys"? As they used to say, "Learning all the time!"
(2) Blogrolling and Blog-reading.
If I had regular blog traffic, say from members of the Salon community---and I don't----I might have to deal with the whole 'blogrolling' thing. Some people have blogrolls as long as your arm; they list 20 or 30 blogs as well as other resources. I can see the 'quid pro quo' aspect of it; even I can understand that if you give someone a link on your site and you give them one on yours, you're helping to direct traffic to their site, and if you are a really popular site, their blog will definitely benefit.
But when I see a giant blogroll, I don't feel at all inclined to click; I just assume that the people listed are the blogger's posse and that their names are there because they returned the favor or because they are so-called "A-list bloggers" that the blogrolling blogger is hoping will notice him or her. I don't assume, because that's insane, that the blogger regularly reads 45 blogs, you know? I am much more likely to click a blogger's links if there aren't too many of them and they appear to be related to the overall content of the site.
I've therefore limited my blogroll to the few blogs I started reading last year and pretty regularly looked at. A couple of the bloggers have been pretty sporadic about updating them (or have been since I started reading them), but I don't mind; there's good stuff in the archives and I choose my blogs based on how much I like the blogger's voice.
I admit it: I will read the blog of the biggest right wingnut on the planet if he or she (ah, my always enraged avenging angel Ann, why no blog to allow progressives like me their minimum RDA of mockery?*) has an engaging (or enraging) voice that pulls me in.
On the other hand, I definitely have found quite a few blogs that look interesting and as if they might qualify to be put into a "Still Deciding" list. A lot of them aren't even Salon blogs, though naturally some of them are.
If I like the writing, the blogger can talk about just about anything and I'll be interested.
For example, I've nothing in the world against Mormons (or rather, only the same things I have against any other conservative religious group), but I have to admit that I enjoy the strident bad-assery of an ex-Mormon woman's blog, Trapped by the Mormons. She's a published writer, so the quality of the writing is high and some of the postings are very funny. I know more than some about Mormons, having spent a certain amount of time educating myself about them when a Mormon friend was struggling with some issues; I mention this because I wonder if a non-Mormon would have enough context to enjoy Collins' adventures, but whether they do or not, I do.
Trapped by the Mormons is definitely a good blog for new and aspiring fiction writers. Natalie Collins includes amusing interviews with new writers and a kick-ass list of agents. But for me, the insight into Utah and Utah culture ("Behind the Zion Curtain") for self-styled Ex-Mos is the draw. It's not like leaving, say, the Episcopal Church.
I'm looking at another by a young girl living in England; I'll talk about it when I've tracked the content a bit further. The endless variety of human experience...
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