A few weeks ago, Joe Gordon, an Edinburgh-based book-seller, was having dinner with a friend, who told him that all the hype about online communities was nonsense. (She did not put it quite so delicately.) He was perfectly placed to put her right because, earlier this year, Gordon achieved mild online fame when he became the first person in Britain to be fired for criticising his employer in a blog.
Support from the virtual community of bloggers made a difficult period much easier to bear and probably helped persuade Waterstone’s to recant, though by then Gordon had already moved to another shop.
Doesn’t this all sound tickety-boo? Aren’t you eager to join in? After all, the American think-tank Pew Internet reckons that a new blog is created every 5.8 seconds, so it can’t be hard. Do not, however, be tempted. Here be dragons. Keep ye thine eyes skinned for hippo-griffs. The absolute golden rule of blogging — it is literally made of gold — is: “Do not blog.”
Who are you trying to kid? There were 70 billion blogs in the world yesterday, there will be 70 billion billion by next week, and what crazy hubris makes you think you have anything new or interesting to say? Yet you, like all the other lemmings, assume your blog will be one of the tiny fraction that is brilliant, and you’ve already got your gleeful little paws over the edge of the cliff. So all Doors can do is offer a few invaluable tips to stop you embarrassing yourself, ruining your love life, alienating your friends and getting the sack. If you follow them. Which you won’t.
At its simplest, a blog (short for weblog) is a page with dated entries, which usually means “Dear diary”. (Tip number one: does the world really need to know what you had for breakfast?) A recent Gallup poll showed that, in spite of Time magazine declaring 2004 the year of the blog, half of America’s supposedly wired population had never heard of blogging. On the other hand, most Americans couldn’t place America on a map of America, so what does that mean? Well, it means this: don’t assume your friends and family know what blogging is. This is important because, when you start, these are the only people who will read what you write. Whether they keep reading or not is up to you.
The enigmatic and self-confessedly wonderful Greenfairydotcom (www.greenfairy.com) was recently nominated for Best British Blog in the Bloggie awards, hosted for the past five years by a 22-year-old web designer in Michigan, whose bio says it all (at www.fairvue.com/nikolai). The fairy, another twenty-something, but female and from London, chooses to remain anonymous, despite revealing online that she was “voluntarily sterilised in May 2000”. She says that she would read plain text on a white background, so long as it’s interesting: “You may be the next Philip Larkin, but if your blog is set in tiny purple text on a black background, or has a picture of a boy-band member featured prominently, I won’t even pause to read the tag line.”
The easiest way to ensure your blog does not look noticeably awful is to start with a free template (see box). When your blogging delusion has deepened and you want the extra credibility of designing your own page, make things easy by using a dedicated program such as Movable Type (www.sixapart.com/movabletype).
A survey conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests you will probably join the 80% of blogs devoted to “personal musings”. It is easy to mock the drones writing about cats and shopping — see, I just did it — but the American Heather Armstrong, whose www.dooce.com won several Bloggies this year, says that this shouldn’t put you off. Since you can’t control your audience, “you should always write for yourself”, she says. “If what you’re saying has a heart and a soul to it, the audience will come.”
She carefully adds that there is nothing wrong with having nothing interesting to say, and Londoner Tom Coates, whose www.plasticbag.org won a lifetime-achievement Bloggie as well as this year’s Best British Blog, agrees: “Just because it’s in public, it doesn’t mean it’s publishing.” There is room for everyone in cyberspace, and mundane, boring blogs aren’t hurting anyone — just don’t expect an audience.
If you do want an audience, then you have to put in some effort, unless you are lucky enough to be a celebrity already, like Moby or William Shatner, or you are in the right place at the right time, like Salam Pax, who became famous for blogging from Baghdad during the war. This depends on your definition of the right place and time, of course, and on whether, as Pax did, you have something interesting to say. If neither of these things apply, you should start by dreaming up a decent name — “John’s Blog” is going to receive fewer random visitors than “The Cleverest Man on Earth” — and you can be even more cunning than this. If you choose a collection of words that people are likely to search for, you may be able to cheat your way up Google’s charts. Try possible future headlines (“War with France”) or song lyrics (“Way to Amarillo”).
It is also helpful to keep an eye on who is reading your musings, so you can pander slavishly to their prejudices. Check up on your visitors through Technorati, using Trackbacks (details at www.movabletype.org/trackback) or, if you are blogging on Blogger, with Kevin’s Manual Trackback Pinger (www.aylwardfamily.com/content/tbping.asp), which has the advantage of sounding like a much-loved children’s television show. If you pander to other bloggers (describing someone else as brilliant, for example), they might post links to your site from theirs. You will develop a desperate, unshakeable, unslakeable thirst for these links.
Google’s dominance means that its website ranking system is vitally important, and the system is based on links. Bloggers score high in Google searches because they link relentlessly to each other. This might seem incestuous, and it is. A link from Glenn Reynolds, who, as Instapundit, is one of the most widely read bloggers in the world, can provoke an “instalanche” (Instapundit avalanche) of visits. It is incestuous both that this happens and that there is a word for it. A link from any of the big bloggers will have a similar, if lesser, effect.
A bubble of notoriety turned Belle de Jour, reputedly the blog of a London call girl, into a cult, then a fat book deal. If your sex life is not much to write home about, there are other ways to attract a burst of helpful fame. One is to blog so unwisely about your work that you get sacked. Armstrong, who was fired after writing about her co-workers, now tells others, “Be ye not so stupid”, but the press certainly helped her towards blogging fame and glory.
