File 770, The Unauthorized Blog

The inspiration for this post came to me last week, and my thoughts crystallized upon reading Jonathan McCalmont’s admission that blogging “plays in to my fondness for objectively quantified measures of success.” For that’s very much what I wanted to talk about: How I get distracted from my vision for File770.com by the urge to compete for quantifiable success in the blogosphere: more hits, higher authority rankings, longer comment chains, and the rest.

What became of my plan to conquer the Technorati universe anyway? Google Analytics’ daily count of my unique visitors, humble as it may be, is double what it was six months ago. Yet after an early takeoff my Technorati Authority — the number of blogs that have linked to me in the last six months – now has shriveled from 24 to 19.

Somebody is saying, “What the hell does that gibberish mean?” Brother, I was right with you a year ago. Now I know what it means. And other bloggers feel my pain. I’m sure my old pal Crotchety does, although his definition of winning requires having lots of revenue-generating traffic.

There are newcomers to blogging who hear that Whatever has 30,000 regular readers and say “I’ll have one of those.” Not me. My ambitions are far more modest. I analyzed the Mount Everest of sf blogs and determined its success is based on eight vital ingredients of which I have two: a computer and an internet service provider. Just the same, I believe that the cream rises to the top. I compared notes with a few other fans and decided 150 unique visitors a day and a Technorati ranking of 70 was within reach.

That didn’t happen automatically, so I helped things along with a few judicious editorial decisions. Like mentioning Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, posting about Star Trek, and dropping giant squid references where Cheryl Morgan might find them. The one thing I wouldn’t do was write about affixing pork products to felines. I could keep my self-esteem as long as I drew the line at that. (Besides, Crotchety tried that and it didn’t work.)(Also I exaggerate – all the Star Trek stuff is here because it genuinely interests me.)

Posting quanities of mildly amusing dross in a wishful desire to have internet robots show me a bigger number is probably innocent, unless it makes any of you who follow the blog wonder why you’re still reading. I enjoy getting the links some of you send me and will keep posting the ones I like. But McCalmont’s post has warned me that the competitive urge should not become a distraction from doing the writing I value most, analyzing what’s happening in sf fandom, and throwing a spotlight on the good work done by fan writers, artists and editors.

13 thoughts on “File 770, The Unauthorized Blog

  1. There’s minor maintenance stuff you may or may not have done, like making sure you’re autopinging various blogtracking sites, known to all the search engines, etc., as well.

    Something else to keep in mind, I say from the vantage of having starting blogging in the last week of December, 2001, is that one’s status is dynamic. One can’t rest on laurels. I once had a Technorati set of numbers about 4 times as high as at present, and was on a lot more blog rolls, and had a lot more regular readers.

    A couple of years or more of erratic and far less frequent blogging will lose most of that, and even a couple of weeks of quiet can lose a lot of folks, let alone a couple of months, let alone more.

    So it’s not a matter of getting a lot of readers, and relaxing. It’s rather unrelenting if numbers matter much to you. Be warned.

  2. One interesting item about technorati and its authority rating – it is a count of links to your site within the last six months. It’s designed to try and capture your site’s current activity levels in the interlinking and dynamic world of the web. So, if someone had added you as a static sidebar link seven or eight months ago, when your blog started to take off, that link has aged out of the stats and technorati is no longer counting it, only newer links.

  3. I don’t know why there seems to be so much hand-wringing over McCalmont’s decision.

    He has burn out, which is strictly due to placing too much importance or to much emotion or too much reliance on the thing for too long.

    I don’t know what his goals were.

    My emotional focus is not on ad revenue, nor is it on traffic. I’m under no compulsion to write every day. My goal is to learn about this ‘blogging thing’ and see where it can go, what I can do with it.

    Don’t make me look like a mercenary, Mike! I’m doing this for fun. Some posts are designed to see how much traction they get, others are just nifty things, or pure fun. (There’s an interesting dynamic here too: more often than not, traction comes from innocent posting, not targeted posting.)

    I’ve been surprised by the amount of attention I’ve already received and that does ‘pressure’ me to make sure that I get something up every day – and I certainly don’t like it when numbers drop – but that’s self-imposed pressure that I could walk away from.

    You’re right; keep the focus, and keep on doing what’s fun. But also remember that File 770 does have an historical responsibility to keep on trucking too. No pressure tho, lol.

  4. I’m with Steve – I’m doing this for fun too. It is nice that people read my stuff, but I’m not going to stop writing about cricket so as not to bore the people who want to read about science fiction, or gender politics.

    My stats went up quite a lot after Worldcon, I think thanks mainly to Paul Cornell plugging the live blogging of the Hugos, but in many ways I was very relieved to see them drop back again afterwards. Having a popular blog doesn’t get you money, and probably doesn’t get you happiness, but it does get you trolls and it means you spend even more time on the blog than you do already.

  5. Steve – Who else besides me has been writing about McCalmont’s decision? I’m not hand-wringing, I’m emphathizing. I speculate (without necessarily being able to prove) that I have experienced some of the things that he’s writing about. // Aren’t you trying to sell things from your site? (Am I wrong?) Think about people in a convention dealers room — we don’t think of them as mercenaries, and that’s not how I think about you. I keep an eye on you as a trailblazer of the internet jungle who’s a bit ahead of me.

    Cheryl – The cricket coverage has never seemed a minus to me. Sometimes I read it. And you have so many international readers that whether they like to see sports coverage may be less significant than that you’re covering a sport whose fans are mainly outside North America. My guess is that tells them immediately that your perspectives are informed by a wider experience of the world.

  6. Gary – I remember that after discovering Amygdala I did some Google research and found someone’s attempt to rank the most authoritative blogs (pre-Technorati, wasn’t it?). Your blog scored very highly. // I’m stuck on GMT for the dumb reason that when I try to reset that datum in the options menu, it not only doesn’t take, my browser gets blocked from viewing the site. I have to close IE and start over.

  7. I very timidly post this, because I know that those have posted already have a much more experienced and much more authoritative opinion that I do, but I’ve never really been able to keep my opinion to myself when it comes to the internet. Steve and Cheryl have a good point in that what should drive a blog is the focus of the blog. I did not really know what kind of a pressure could result in the drive to get higher levels of traffic till I started developing a Knowledge Base for the company I work for. As soon as they wanted to make this great tool, originally designed to help our tech support agents, accessible to the world for all to see, suddenly the task feel to me to make it visible and popular too. Our company suddenly switched from wanting something that was a well developed tool just for our use, to wanting the best knowledge base blog out there.

    Somewhere along the line we all have to ask ourselves the question, “why are we doing this?” Do our blogs exist to please us the authors? Do they exist to provide useful sources of information to our readers? Do they exist as a forum for flexing our debating skills and sense of humor? What ever the reason for our blog’s existence, the moment the quest for fame and/or recognition becomes a primary concern the intent of a blog tends to take a side set to that goal. Readers do not return to a blog because it is popular, but because they enjoy the content.

    There is a balance between exposure and content. But exposure and popularity are not the same thing. Yes, get File 770 as much exposure as possible, but do not get sucked in the destructive spiral of trying to win an internet popularity contest. Be true to your readers, true to your concept/mission, and network with other blogs as a means of exposure. Otherwise, like Cheryl mentioned, you will put in a lot of time and energy into a blog that attracts a lot of Tolls, and not very many of the people it was intended reach in the first place.

    Just my own humble two cents.

  8. Pingback: Balance and the Pressure of Success « Trinity’s World

  9. I must agree with Mike… there’s been no hand-wringing about the closure of SFDiplomat. If anything the attitude has been to assume that I’ll be back in a little while (which is a fair assumption given that I have stepped back before, though I did so for quite different reasons).

    In my final post, I mentioned that I don’t think that blogging is the right platform for me and I think that it is because people who read blogs by and large refer a certain kind of content: They want it short, they want it frequent and they want it relatively easy. Arguably my most depressing experience as a blogger was the fact that I would put out quite involved works of criticism and nobody aside from my regulars would give a shit but when I put together a half-arsed post about why Krull is a better film than Lord of the Rings I get 20,000 hits over a weekend.

    I don’t think the pursuit of hits, visitors, links and technorati rating is entirely rational. I just think that they’re there… they’re a feedback mechanism and it’s easy to wind up paying a lot of attention to them. I’ve never in my life pursued popularity… in fact I tend to see myself as an outsider to practically everything (including my own family) but those numbers are there… So I think it’s easier to say that we shouldn’t pay attention to these things than it is to actually pay less attention to them 🙂

  10. “I’m with Steve – I’m doing this for fun too. It is nice that people read my stuff, but I’m not going to stop writing about cricket so as not to bore the people who want to read about science fiction, or gender politics.”

    This is why the “subject” of my blog is whatever I feel like writing about or linking to that day. Some days, or weeks, it’s a lot more of one, than another, but at various times it’s politics, science, history, book reviews, weird stuff, funny stuff, science fiction, fandom, whatever.

    I am quite sure it drives away a lot of people. Sf fans get bored with the politics, political folks wonder what’s up with all the Star Trek stuff, and so on. Some folks just don’t want to use the “scroll” keys.

    But I’d get bored otherwise, and I don’t want to do four or five separate blogs, so there it is. There are endless things I could do to increase readership that I have no interest in doing. (Some things that I don’t mind doing, I’ll do; but not lots of other stuff.)

    Insofar as I care about readers, my primary goal is to find readers that like me, or my selection and presentation of stuff, rather than vice versa.

    And, hey, that’s how my current sweetie found me, so it’s had substantial benefits, I have to say. 🙂 (Mind, it did take 6-plus years of blogging.)

    “Gary – I remember that after discovering Amygdala I did some Google research and found someone’s attempt to rank the most authoritative blogs (pre-Technorati, wasn’t it?).”

    Yeah, back in 2002-4 I was relatively popular. I was in the top ten of the Blogstreet listings (later bought out by an Indian company and devoted to only Indian blogs), and I was a “Large Mammal” in the TTLB Ecosystem. As I said, such things can be fleeting if you don’t constantly work to stay up there.

    “I have to close IE”

    There’s your problem. 😉

    I recommend Firefox, or even Google Chrome, though some like Opera and some like Safari.

    “Arguably my most depressing experience as a blogger was the fact that I would put out quite involved works of criticism and nobody aside from my regulars would give a shit but when I put together a half-arsed post about why Krull is a better film than Lord of the Rings I get 20,000 hits over a weekend.”

    Yep. And one never knows what will get a lot of response by way of links, more often than not.

    One thing I did consciously do, back when I had a ton of energy for blogging, was eventually realize that there was an upper limit as to how many posts, and how many words, to post per day. There was a long stretch when I was doing some 40-60 posts a day, or even more. And writing posts that ran upwards of 6,000-8,000 words apiece, albeit largely excerpts from other writers.

    And I realized that nobody, but nobody, would read remotely that much wordage from me.

    My problem these days is in the other direction: trying to find enough energy and time, and overcome my attacks of depression and anxiety, enough to post at least a fraction per day or week of what I’d ideally like to. But that’s another topic.

    “I don’t think the pursuit of hits, visitors, links and technorati rating is entirely rational. ”

    Sure, because fans have never chased egoboo before.

    😉

    “in fact I tend to see myself as an outsider to practically everything (including my own family) ”

    This, too, makes you utterly unlike most traditional sf fans.

  11. “There’s your problem.”

    More seriously, although I do prefer any of those other browsers to IE, IE is probably still the most widely written-for browser, so if something isn’t working for you with it, odds are that you need to adjust your settings, whether security settings, or your Javascript, or something else like that there.

  12. Mike,

    I think ‘trying to sell’ is the operative phrase.

    I’ve had some small success for the past 4 years with direct advertising sales on the web (not click-thru ad referer or affiliate type stuff).

    You referenced trade shows. The stage I’m at right now is more like the freebie lit table next to registration. I’m hoping that a flyer I’ve got out there will generate some interest – or reaction will show me how to create a better flyer. Maybe next year I’ll have a table inside the huckster’s room.

    I’m searching for the elusive mix of interesting stuff combined with appropriate ads to create some kind of natural soup in which everything is blended and from which some revenue flows easily.

    I prefer the word ‘experiment’ to describe what I’m engaged in, rather than ‘revenue generation’. Of course, experimental success will lead to the latter, but there’s no guarantee of that.

    You aren’t the only one that commented on McCalmont, and maybe ‘hand-wringing’ was the wrong characterization, but I found it interesting that so much attention was being paid to a simple case of burn out.

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