What Makes Some Blogs So Popular?
| Publication:IBD; | Date:Jan 4, 2005; | Section:Internet & Technology; | Page Number:4 |
Found this in Investor's Business Daily, I guess I'll have to write some more personal articles!! Enjoy - John
COMPUTERS MADE PLAIN
What Makes Some Blogs So Popular?
They Need Right Mix The best blogs typically reveal something about the writer, experts find
BY DAVID ISAAC INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Blog. The word doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. It joins the ranks of such words as Slorc, an old acronym for Burma’s ruling party, or the equally unpalatable burp.
But a blog, unlike an oppressive regime in Southeast Asia or something caused by gas in your stomach, can be a force for good.
Blog is short for Web log — a type of Internet Web page. Definitions vary, but a blog is essentially a collection of postings frequently updated by one or more people.
The postings vary from long essays to just links to other Web sites. Sometimes a brief comment accompanies the link. This type of posting tends to be the most common.
Blogs can cover everything, from politics to art to personal anecdotes. But what makes a blog popular? Why do people surf more to some of the 4 million or so blogs and not to others?
Popular blogs are those that reveal something about the person behind them, says Jason Goldman, product manager of Blogger, a Web site acquired by Google GOOG in 2003 that lets anyone set up their own blog for free.
A good blog is “where the author shares something about themselves that is compelling and unique. You hear a voice that you’ve not heard before,” he said.
Goldman entered the blogosphere, as the world of blogs is called, by joining a blog with a number of contributors. They each posted items that interested them to the site.
“The ‘ah-ha’ moment for me was seeing a side of my friends, whom I’d known for years, that I’d never seen before,” he said. “I could feel through their posts, even if it was just a link to a funny comic, their own style, their own sensibilities.”
It’s strange to think that a simple link to something like a Dave Barry column could give a reader deep insight into the person who posted that link. But bloggers insist that such postings over time can reveal a lot about a person.
It may be that the variety and quality of those postings are what make for an interesting blog.
One of the most popular is boingboing.net. Technorati, a site that keeps track of blog metrics, lists boingboing as No. 1 among the top 100 blogs. According to statistics on boingboing.net, 859,236 unique visitors went to the site between Dec. 1 and Dec. 20.
Boingboing’s postings are eclec- tic. You never know what you might find. On one day, there was a link to an article about surgeons who improved motor skills playing video games. Another was to a video of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” acted out with Lego pieces.
A third item linked to a scholarly analysis of the disorders of Gollum — a character from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”
The blog is shared by four people, who post to the site. A fifth manages the ads. Technology journalist Xeni Jardin, one of the four who contributes content, describes boingboing as a “personal scrapbook.”
“Just imagine a collaboratively held scrapbook of cool or interesting or frightening or important things that have technology running through them somewhere as a thread,” she said.
Jardin says frequency and quality of posts are both important to a successful blog. She agrees with Blogger’s Goldman that a good blog says something about the person who created it.
Seeking ‘Intimacy’
“You can pick blogs where there are many, many posts that appear each day that lack a certain kind of intimacy,” Jardin said. “When you can feel something of the personality of the blogger behind the post — it’s not so much the data that they’re sharing as much as intimate threads of their own personality.”
Boingboing won four prizes from the 2004 Weblog Awards, including Weblog of the Year.
The secret to boingboing’s success? “You have four quirky personalities who aren’t afraid of sharing of themselves,” Jardin said. They also post a lot. Each one posts between 15 and 20 items a day, she says.
Boingboing isn’t only quirky. It’s also broken stories, beating the mainstream press, she says.
Breaking a story can make a blog instantly popular. Powerline and Little Green Footballs were two blogs that made front-page news during “Rathergate.”
The blogs showed that documents used by former CBS News anchor Dan Rather for a story about President Bush’s stint in the Texas Air National Guard were fraudulent.
Citizen journalist blogs will become an increasingly important part of the Web, says Matt Welch, a writer for Reason magazine. They “will beat local newspapers on stories because they show more passion and they’re more nimble,” he said.
‘Big Bang’
Welch began his own blog shortly after 9-11 as a place he could bookmark news events. His was one of many blogs that appeared post-9-11. To describe them, Welch coined the term War Blogs. “It was the big bang for Web logging,” Welch said. “My readers went from 30 in the first day to 200 in the second day to 1,000 in the third day.”
After 9-11, people wanted analysis “but also a warmth and humanity in their media,” he said. “You wanted to believe people were out there who thought like you did or were struggling with this stuff.”
Outside the U.S., political blogs take on added importance if they operate from within repressive regimes. In Iran, five bloggers have been jailed by the government.
Venezuela may see an explosion of blogs as it cracks down on other forms of media, says Daniel Duquenal, whose English-language blog, Venezuela News and Views, recently won an online award for most popular Latin American blog.
Duquenal says he began his site to explain to his friends what President Hugo Chavez’s regime was doing to his country.
“Little by little I realized that people I didn’t know were reading the blog regularly and asking me questions,” he said. “It’s acquired a certain importance.”
He’s worried the government may take action against him. “Some of the people in the government are monitoring my blog quite closely,” he said.
That kind of popularity Duquenal could do without. 
The Blogger.com site makes it easy to start a low-frills Web log for free.
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