Showing posts with label Blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blog. Show all posts

March 14, 2011

Bloggers are tenaciously idealistic fools, as they should be

I'd say that the blog is rather dead. You already know that and you're shamelessly yawning. No, don't suppress it! It is perfectly alright. It is commonly known that most blogs are deathly boring. Who has the time to read all those undoubtedly brilliant but tediously long and redundant items? Most blogs have a high yawn-factor. People stop reading at just about this point in any blog post. Whatever I write after this, probably won't be read.

Oh, you're still with me? Wow, I'm flattered. I mean it, because you got past the title and my first paragraph. A well read blog post has a catchy title and is up-front with the conclusion. Whatever is read after the first paragraph is pure bonus. If you're really brilliant, you manage to keep the reader's attention a little while longer. But more often than not, your message has already been brought accross by an army of bloggers before you posted your own message.

You, the tenaciously idealistic, blogging fool , usually won't think of that when you write your master piece. I don't intend to make fun of bloggers (well, just a little bit). Being foolishly idealistic actually is a good thing. The power is in the larger numbers. The more redundant the message, the more important it must be. So, don't hold back, publish that redundant post.

Perhaps you could target your message a little more precisely. The avarage blog is often hard to read on a large portion of the devices used for accessing the internet. For instance, if your post is targetted to business people, aim for best readability on a blackberry: Catchy title plus 5 or 6 sentences top, and start with the conclusion. Say what you want to say first, don't build it up.

Or if your intended audience consists of stay-at-home moms, aim at something Oprah would want to read to them from her show. A post titled "Why flirting with other men and buying shoes makes you happy", would get their attention. Your Oprah style piece ideally fits on a single ipad screen while taking the ad space, easily amounting to 50%, into account. That leaves space for perhaps two paragraphs. Say what you want to say first, don't build it up.

But then again, I am no expert on this topic, because statistics don't lie. This blog is way up there on the list of blogs with a high yawn-factor. I could say that I don't care, because I mostly write for myself. But that would be utter nonsense, because I am also a tenaciously idealistic fool who desperately wants to see the number of page views reach into the tens of thousands.





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April 14, 2010

Should I help promote Pluggio?

I got an email today from Justin Vincent. Doesn't ring a bell? Well, he's the guy behind TweetMiner, and of lately, Pluggio (The Helpful Twitter Client). TweetMiner basically is...was an RSS reader combined with a Twitter client. It allowed you to quickly and easily tweet about items from your RSS feeds. It also allowed you to schedule when your tweets were to be submitted to Twitter. After it got extended with multi-acount support and support for other social networks such as facebook and LinkedIn, TweetMiner was renamed to Pluggio (which still provides all those useful functions of course).

I use Pluggio every now and then, but not to its full potential (yet?).

Here's what Justin wrote in his email:

Pluggio needs your help!

Are you (or someone you know) a blogger?
If so we would love it if you could blog/review Pluggio.
I've created a bloggers resource page with pics and videos:
http://pluggio.com/bloggers

No worries if you're not interested or don't have time!

Thanks for reading :)

Cheers,
Justin

If you follow the provided link you will read that you could get a FREE 1 year account if your blog gets over 10k unique visitors/month. It could be interpreted like this: Don't bother to help if your blog gets 9999 unique visitors per month or less. My blog only gets about 100 UV's/month, not including my dad (Hi dad, you're always welcome, you know that). So, I shouldn't even bother to bother. My blog is practically invisible, so, whether I like or dislike Pluggio, hardly anyone would see it.

But besides the above threshold, I find it interesting that Justin makes this appeal at all. Maybe I have been moving in the wrong circles, but this hasn't happened to me before. I have accounts for many online services including several twitter clients (Seesmic, PeoplBrowser, ...), but none have ever requested this from me. As far as I am concerned, this is a unique request. I wonder what Justin is exactly after? He is reaching out to popular bloggers to write about Pluggio, so exposure must be a big part of it.

Justin, I hope your Pluggio will get the exposure increase you are after. I am giving you the exposure this post gets. If you're lucky, it'll hit 50 visits. At your service!



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