Techfoot

This is a quick follow-up to my last post about choosing a writing strategy for your for your blog. In the last post, I talked about treating your blog as an a forum to explore all the interesting things that you learn about through the web, reading, conversations, and all the other sources of information that come into your personal information universe. Readers will seek out your blog as a way of entering into your world and of finding resources that they never would have found on their own.

Another strategy is to pick out a particular area of expertise and write deeply and extensively about issues within that area. Readers come to your site because you know more about this topic than almost anyone else in the world. (Or at least on the internet.) The goal of this type of blogging is summed up in this quote from Ron Gross’s book The Independent Scholar’s Handbook:

Max Schuster was not a man to mince words or to warm you up with small talk. His words were well honed; he obviously had delivered this message before and knew exactly what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. Fixing me with a firm eye over the glistening mahogany desktop he declared: “I have one bit of advice for you–not just for success in this business, but personally. Begin at once–not today or tomorrow or at some indefinite date, but right now, at this precise moment–to chose some subject, some concept, some great name or idea or idea in history on which you can eventually make yourselves the world’s supreme expert. Start a crash program immediately to qualify yourself for this self-assignment through reading, research and reflection. In his librarylike office, such a program did not seem impossible, as a generous slice of the world’s wisdom was within arms reach.

In a world defined by the long tail, just about every topic needs its experts. One of my favorite examples has been

43 Folders where Merlin Mann has turned his own inability to manage his time and his life into what appears to be a full-time job. If you have a passion, no matter how narrow, your blog can be a place to find others who share it.

This is a part of a series of posts I’m doing in anticipation of my new role as a member of the community of official bloggers at the College of William and Mary. The goal is to identify some guidelines for blogging that have emerged from my work with students and academic blogging over the last half decade.

People visit websites because of the content. Once you’ve figured out why you’re becoming involved in this blogging business at all, it’s helpful to do plan what you’re going to write about. The vast majority of bloggers write primarily to share information with a few friends or relatives, and the content flows naturally from their everyday lives. Their blogs are filled with hilarious anecdotes about their cats, tales of fabulous meals at local Mexican restaurants and occasional musings about the meaning of life.

Professional blogging is a little different. Since you can’t count on your cat to provide the content for your posts, you need to come up with a focus that will attract readers to your site and engage them with your material. There are at least two general strategies for making that decision: the BoingBoing strategy and 43Folders methodology.

Writers following the BoingBoing strategy emulate the success of BoingBoing.net. which seeks to be a world-wide directory of “cultural curiosities and interesting technologies” and draws readers by providing a mix of ideas that readers might miss if left to their own devices. (For most of the history of the blogosphere, BoingBong has been the internet’s most popular blog, though it now appears to have been surpassed by the Huffington Post.)

A typical BoingBoing session includes topics like the following:

• US seizes Danish dress-shop’s payment to Pakistan in the name of “terrorism”
• First-ever video of human ovulation
• Denial-of-coffee attacks affect networked coffee-maker
• Recycled teacup lights

Bloggers using the BoingBoing strategy are a lot like the producers of the Today Show. Readers are attracted to the mix of stories and the particular sensibilities of editors. They return to the site to be entertained, challenged and enlightened. One of the best examples of this strategy in the educational arena is the far-ranging writings of Gardner Campbell, covering topics ranging from John Donne to Douglas Engelbart, the Beatles, Beach Boys and fish tacos. Gardner’s blog has been the model that I’ve used most often to introduce my students to blogging, and most of them have adopted the generalist strategy.

There is, however, another method for organizing your blog, and I’ll write more about that tomorrow.

For most people, writing is hard work. Writing for a public forum on the internet is hard, scary work. Once you push the “submit” button, your words are out there for everyone to see and respond to, instantly searchable, and living in perpetuity in the Google cache or deep in the Internet Archive. Yet, tens of millions of folks all over the world overcome their fear to post their content on the web–including 64% of American teens who are “content creators“, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center. One good bit of advice for beginning bloggers, and more experienced folks who are starting a new project, is to “think first and type later.” Before making that first post, take a few minutes and answer three questions. (A number one pencil and a legal pad are the perfect tools for this part of the process, but it’s OK to type if you’ve forgotten how to use a pencil.)

• Purpose: Why am I doing this?
• Content: What am I going to write about?
• Process: How am I going to do it?

There are lots of good reasons to publish on the web. For me, posting regularly is a discipline that accomplishes two goals. First, it focuses my attention by forcing me to look the mass of information that I’ve been exposed on any particular day and evaluate the usefulness (or interestingness) of that information. The half-hour that I’m investing in writing this post could be spent in an infinite number of other ways. What, if anything, justifies the time and energy to highlight a particular idea, pie and hold up for further inspection? The possible stories come from everywhere–something that I read, a TV or radio program, podcast, conversation or just a random thought that popped into my mind. Focused attention helps to make sense from the torrent of information.

The second discipline is to try to figure out the utility of writing about a particular topic for the reader. One major reason for publishing is to allow others to benefit from what I’ve learned from my experience. In my writing, I’m always searching for some way to help members of my community to broaden their perspectives, to look at their information universe a little differently, or to think of ways to improve their practice.

As an official faculty blogger, my purpose is a little different than it has been for other writing I’ve done. We know that the most frequent visitors to the site are from outside William and Mary, some of whom may not be interested in the nuts and bolts of our technology infrastructure. My task here is to look what’s happening at the college from my personal perspective and post about topics that be interesting and helpful to parents, prospective students, alumni and members of the larger educational community. By merging my personal perspective with those of the other writers on the project, we provide an additional window into the William and Mary experience that is emergent, individual, authentic and vibrant.

In my next post, I take a look at how to translate that purpose into something more concrete by looking at the second question: what am I going to write about?