y i r bad at blogging

June 9, 2010 under metablogging

To run a popular blog, you need focus.

I’m not talking about the kind of focus required to sit down and write a post. Although you need that, too.

Let me rephrase – to run a popular blog, you need to have a focus or theme that ties your posts together.  Readers need to have an idea of what they will see on your blog before they visit, otherwise they won’t visit.

It’s very simple. Let me use myself as an example. When I surf the web, I go to sites where I know what I will be getting. When I want to read the news, I go to BBC news. When I want to look at interesting random sites, I go to blogs about interesting random sites. When I want to read about theology, I go to websites and blogs about theology.

When I hit a website that does not fit my current frame of mind or train of thought… I close it. Quickly.

I do not click on its links. I do not look at its about page. I just close it. Why? Because I have a sense, or a feeling, of what it is I want to see, and the website does not match that feeling.

I already know what it is I want to look at before I go surfing for it on the net.

A popular blog is generally predictable. Even if it’s a blog about, “Random interesting stuff”. Because a good blog about “Random interesting stuff” will consistently post “Random interesting stuff”. When I go there, I know what is there will be random, and I know what is there will be interesting. And I’m okay with that, because that’s what I’m looking for. That’s why I’m visiting.

But if I can’t categorize a blog, and if I don’t know why I’m visiting it… eventually I’ll ask the question, “Why  am I visiting it?” and then… I’ll stop visiting.

Consistency is the way to get repeat visitors.

As an example, one of the posts on my blog that gets the most hits is, “Portentious.” Why? Because I’m #5 on Google for “Portentious”. It’s pretty fricken’ awesome.

But none of those visitors will ever return to the Happy Moron or visit any other page, because the Happy Moron is not an etymology blog. It’s not a word of the day blog. None of those visitors will ever look and say, “What an interesting site centered around this topic in which I have an interest, I must visit it regularly.”

To be frank, there is no topic. Unless it’s me. Which might be okay for my mom – Hi, Mom! – but it’s not going to generate any internet traffic.

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Nothing happening

April 8, 2010 under metablogging

Sorry folks, there’s been no real content for a while. My thoughts are elsewhere at the moment. I’d like to muster some creative juices at some point, but they might take some mustering.

Later, I might throw out a couple of links.

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Internet weirdness

December 12, 2009 under metablogging

AmbaSewa wrote:

“I currently post comments on a fairly regular basis on four blogs.
Two are the blogs of total strangers. Mind you, the totality of their strangeness is reducing- one particularly blogs prolifically.”

There’s a weirdness that comes from reading other people’s deep expressions on a blog.

You become engaged and drawn in and you *feel* a connection. But there really isn’t a connection, because it’s only one sided. The feeling is there, but there’s nothing genuine backing it. You read something that has you emotionally fired up. But you don’t know the person and they don’t know you.

There are, I think, two sides to it. I once heard there are two sides to everything ;-)

The Sharing Side

Traditionally, people build up conversation about deeply personal stuff relatively slowly and only with people they trust. People become acquaintances, and then social friends, and then good friends, and maybe best friends.

And then they talk about these things.

But now, we can record our innermost stuff on the internet! Nothing feels risky anymore, because there’s no immediate feedback to tell us we’ve done something unwise and possibly damaging. Hmm… I think I’ll say that again because it feels important.

Nothing feels risky anymore.

In the flesh and blood world, when you say something deeply personal in the wrong company, you know it. Immediately. Things get to that really awkward place really fast. I know. I’ve been there, on both sides. I don’t have to tell you this. You know. You’ve been there. On both sides.

When you post something online, you don’t get that feedback. People could be reading this very post and shuddering, and saying, “I’ll never speak to him again. Too much information! That was unspeakably awkward.” Probably not – but the point is, I don’t get to see them react that way. People could be feeling all warm and fuzzy. I don’t know.

The vast majority of people who read, don’t comment. The result is that when you post something like that… It doesn’t feel either catastrophic or heroic. The feeling of it is totally removed from the reality.

And so we’re led to make decisions we wouldn’t otherwise. Like sharing something that is best friend, pinky-swear material because we never know that it makes things awkward.

The Hearing Side

The hearing side weirdness is what happens when we browse our Facebook feed. We’re sitting there flipping through and we know everything that’s going on in all our friends’ lives. We feel connected. But we weren’t really part of any of those stories.

There’s that disconnect with reality again. We feel differently than we should. Welcome to Internet weirdness.

It happens when we see someone dumping their soul on a blog. It’s compelling.

We don’t really know how to respond, because the messages we’re receiving are contradicting one another. On the one hand, we’re reading pinky-swear stuff – it’s a real best friend level interaction. On the other hand, it’s coming from a complete stranger.

What exactly is the right and proper relationship? It doesn’t fit any pre-built boxes.

This is similar to Seth Godin’s “fake networking” - the illusion, and more importantly, the feeling of being connected, but without any genuine interchange of something worthwhile. Friendship is built on sacrifice and if you’ve only read someone’s blog, there hasn’t been any yet.

That’s why conversation is important. That’s why the exchange (and not just consumption) of worthwhile thoughts and feelings is important. That’s why commenting is valuable. It grounds people. It gives people something that, while not as effective as a face to face conversation, is suddenly far more real than just reading.

People can build real friendships this way. We’ve done it through letters in the past. There are still limitations, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make this medium work for us.

We will adapt, and we will eventually arrive at a social approach that works – that isn’t awkward or inappropriate, that is sustainable and not viewed as all-sufficient.

I bet it will have better feedback mechanisms though.

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What was Jesus’s incentive?

November 13, 2009 under metablogging, theology

Freakonomics posed this as “The greatest question ever asked”

The economics hook is, of course, that people act according to incentives and it’s fun to try and examine a ‘selfless’ act.

It’s a polarizing topic; the post gets 200 comments where a more normal number would be around 30. But what kind of comments? I looked at this, and said, “Boy the opinions are sure to come out on this.”

It’s a chance to see a fascinating cross-section of viewpoints on an interesting topic.

jimi (#1)  starts off well with a balanced viewpoint. He thinks, “People are inherently selfish, Jesus is not.” but affirms altruism and acknowledges a spectrum.

charlie (#2)  points out the massive incentive of all the glory.

justin (#3) whips out a false dichotomy based on a poor understanding of Christian theology. “If you’re a Christian, then he isn’t a person…”

orphan cow (#4) “Eternal Life… or eternal fame… depending on your beliefs.”

superdave (#5) indicates Jesus was exceptional and is points out that he is now worshiped.

ben (#6) thinks the incentive was love.

nate (#8) concurs.

matt (#9) suggests that God is just polishing his image.

dolores (#10) cracks a joke. It’s an okay joke.

sai (#12) thinks we do things for the warm fuzzies we get; altruism doesn’t exist.

keven (#13) – he was maximizing utility.

jim (#14) blames  the Romans.

abhishek (#16) thinks Jesus was exceptional.

pierre-louis (#20) slips in a dig at religion while explaining altruism as long term selfishness.

howie (#21) brings forth the christian rhetoric.

Tommy in the beanfields (#22) thinks Jesus was a madman and not rational.

richard deliberty(#23) figures Jesus never saw it coming

gerv (#25) points out that responding to incentives is not necessarily selfish. Good point, gerv.

tim (#30) has a big problem with religion.

petteri (#33) says you can’t apply statistical economics to individuals.

rishi (#36) also blames the romans

mike d (#42) is eloquent.

“There are no economics in heaven.

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. Because scarcity exists, incentives exist. Jesus’ promise – the promise of heaven – is the end of scarcity and an eternity of abundance. Jesus’ choice, then, was between ruling a world of scarce resources and completely transforming it into a world of abundance.”

PsiCop (#43) thinks altruism is a good story-telling device.

joshua (#46) brings the Bible into it – Hebrews 12:2 aka he did it for joy.

PaulD (#48) mentions the mother-child relationship. I’m surprised it took so long.

caca feugo (#52) gives a solid breakdown that he did it for love.

#57 takes #3 to task – Jesus was fully human

#58  – Jesus was fictional

#60 – Jesus was crazy

#62 – He didn’t have a choice

#65 – For the legacy

apok #70 “…But incentives mean that had the price of going to the Cross increased, he would’ve not done so, and I think it’s likely the Cross was inelastic with respect to price.”

#72 – it’s a good story about love.

#80 – Jesus was a jewish nationalist who was killed by the Romans but who never intended to redeem people’s sins.

#83 – He didn’t exist

#88 – Jesus was being tricky and unconventional

#91 – Jesus knew what he was doing.

#92 doesn’t like religion

#97 – soldiers die for their comrades and get medals for it

#122 – we make choices according to how we interpret our current experience. Spiritual/enlightened decision making is better.

#130 – the West can’t understand Jesus

#136,7,8 – Jesus isn’t human so it doesn’t count

#154 – we don’t know that church provided records are accurate

Observations and Conclusions

There were a great many (different!) honestly held beliefs about who Jesus was – they ran the spectrum from entirely fictional to a Jewish nationalist to a madman to a cult leader to a teacher to the Son of God. I was surprised by the number of people who believed Jesus was purely fictional.

I was also surprised by the number of people who viewed Jesus (and his experience) as fundamentally unlike them and their experience – the ‘Jesus was exceptional’ stance. It feels like it’s being used to justify a more ‘reasonable’ set of expectations for every one else.

Comments on a blog are a terrible place for discussion. They encourage shallow, quick retorts. There’s the pressure to post before the discussion moves on past you and your comment never gets read. There’s quite a bit of empty zealotry, although not nearly as much as on CBC message boards.

The couple people who labeled themselves ‘agnostic’ seemed to be able to describe the Christian position fairly well and without undue malice.

I don’t know what I intended to learn from summarizing the discussion; but I’m suddenly convicted of my own tendancy to live a life defined by scarcity – “I must do XXXX because…”

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Apologies

October 27, 2009 under metablogging

No new Gretel episode yesterday. There is another piece, though.

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Public Service Announcement – Mostly Fairy Tales

September 30, 2009 under metablogging

Given that I’m fresh out of real content, I’ve done some house-keeping instead.

Behold the Mostly Fairy Tales page… an index of all the Monday fairytales, without the annoying Part I – Part II – Part III baloney. As full blown pages on the site, each gets its own permanent link and is easily findable in the site hierarchy on the right.

Making these things pages has another benefit: WordPress has a nice and consistent url naming strategy, so it’s fairly easy to remember links to pages.

e.g.

http://thehappymoron.com/blog/mostly-fairy-tales/jack/

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Distance on the Internet – Part II

August 28, 2009 under metablogging

Part I looked at how we might think of distance on the internet, working from the concept of physical distance applying its principles in a digital network.

It got as far as Google, but it ignored linking.

Arguably, the straight line of the internet is a hyperlink. It’s the shortest distance between two points. It’s the magic statement, “I wish to get there from here.”

Because a link represents essentially zero distance, once you have a link to something, you essentially have the thing itself. So the distance to the thing is how far away you are from a link to it, and this is why Google is a distance shortener.

This is why important sites are bigger; why they are closer to everything, because there are links to them everywhere. This is why they are more findable on Google, because Google itself examines the number of links to something in order to determine its importance.

Because Google’s PageRank algorithm depends on linking between sites, it does not define internet distance, but rather reflects it. You can find something on Google because it was closer to you than other things online. It was closer to you because it was heavily linked.

Just as Google ranking is a reflection of linking, linking itself is a reflection of something else.

Linking is a representation of relationship. A link exists because of some real world connection. It could be a thought or a discussion or friendship or a business relationship… But somehow a real connection of some sort was formed.

The point is, something happened in the real world, and a link was born.

So then…

Internet distance is a measure of relationship.

Think of two forums on the same special interest topic. They’re heavily interlinked, visited by the same people. Visitors failing to find an answer on one are referred to the other one.

They’re close.

A forum on another topic? It’s a world away, but it’s a world away not because of any physical barrier but because a lack of relationship.

The distance exists in people’s minds, in people’s hearts, in people’s intentions and interests.

The instant I care about something, it becomes far easier to find – it is closer. Once I know the name of something it is closer to me. If I speak the specific language of a subject, I can find things on it; it is closer.

Once technical issues are taken care of…

The only distance left is the distance between people.

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Distance on the Internet – Part I

August 26, 2009 under metablogging

A few thoughts on how far apart things can be in a virtual world.

I’ve previously said that distance doesn’t exist on the internet, and that the internet doesn’t have any corners.

This is true in some ways, but less true in others.

There are many ways you can try and conceptualize distance on the internet. The question is, which ones are useful?

How about physical distance?

The database and web server for this blog live on a computer in a room somewhere. They’re physically distanced from other computers on the internet. So it is possible to say that my blog is closer to some websites than it is to others, because my web hosting provider is a shared provider that hosts multiple websites on the same computer. There are a random handful of websites which are physically close to mine, because they are hosted on the same machine.

Of course, it’s not at all useful to say this, because electrons travel at the speed of light, so from the point of view of, “How long does it take to get there from here?” it takes electrons the same amount of time (practically speaking) to get from anywhere to anywhere else. It’s a weird property of the internet that means that our old concepts need not apply.

More relevant in making things take longer to get from one place to another place is the number of network things in the way. Routers, switches, network conditions. This is tough to measure, however, because in these terms, there’s no fixed distance between two points. Data Packet routing on the internet is dynamic; as certain networks become congested or undergo maintenance, there ceases to be one shortest distance from here to there. Or from there to here.

If physical distance is not particularly useful as a concept of internet distance, physical time is not particularly useful, either.

But at least thinking about the question, “How long does it take to get there from here?” is a step forward.

Maybe if it’s not a measure of distance per se, it’s at least getting to the heart of what we care about. Even in real world distance, more often we care about how long it takes to get there than how many miles (or kilometers) it is. And if we ever do care about physical distance, it’s because we want to know if we’ll have to get gas.

Well, if gas is cheap (and I mean really, really, fly around the world seven times on a drop cheap) we can afford to drop the need for distance altogether and just talk about how long it takes to get there.

We can bump it up from a physical time question to a personal question. How quickly can a person get from one place to another on the internet? That’s a fairly good measure of distance, isn’t it?

At last we’re getting somewhere, but once again the internet renders our proposed measuring scheme somewhat useless, because it has Google.

Via Google, getting from anywhere to anywhere else is pretty quick. It’s the magic teleporter. In a world with built-in teleportation, distance as a concept starts to diminish in importance.

There are still nuances, though. If you don’t show up in the first 10 google hits, are you farther away than the first page results? Not all sites are equally googleable. If you’re worried about the time it takes to get someplace, then some sites are closer to you than others, with the most googleable site being the closest.

Actually, Google itself is the closest, because it’s the most googleable site of all. It’s certainly closer than any other site on the internet.

Now it seems that the measure of distance seems to be the importance of a site. More important sites are closer. Bigger sites (and not in a physical sense of bigger)  are closer.

As soon as you say this, however, you have to step back and see exactly how different a world you’re playing in, becase if Bigger things are Closer, then you have to accept the fact that distance on the internet is directional.

Bigger sites are Closer to every other site.
Smaller sites are Farther from every other site. Even from the Big ones.

BBC News is close to me (big, important) but I’m very very far from it. We have this same notion in the real world, but it’s pretty weak. An example might be cycling on hills. Physically the distance from top to bottom is the same, but it’s a very different experience going up and coming down.

But so far, I’ve only talked about Google. It’s far from the only means of navigation on the internet.

I guess there’s more for Part II.

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Seth Godin – Social Networking

August 25, 2009 under metablogging

“Networking is always important when it’s real and it’s always a useless distraction when it’s fake.
What the internet has allowed is an enormous amount of fake networking to take place.”

The internet can be used to build real relationships. Perhaps it’s not the most effective medium for doing so, but it has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. I think however,  because the scale of it is just so big, there’s a real risk of trying to grasp too much of it, and losing the little you have in the process.

It’s dangerous to swap out flesh and blood interactions for textual ones.

Seth, as a marketer and a businessman, is looking at the business aspect of the issue. But there’s a more personal face to it, and who better than an Archbishop to explore it? You’d hope that an Archbishop, even if not versed on technology, would understand something about people.

“The Archbishop also warned of the danger of suicide among young people who threw themselves into a network of friendships that could easily collapse.
He said young people were being encouraged to build up collections of friends as commodities, and were left desolate when these transient relationships broke down. “

Food for thought.

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What is “Internet Distance”?

August 21, 2009 under metablogging

Hmmm… Illinois doesn’t want sex offenders to use social networking.

Actually, the state is making it a felony for them to do so.

“The idea was, if the predator is supposed to be a registered sex offender, they should keep their Internet distance as well as their physical distance.”

For the longest time, I was able to make a very simple distinction.

There was stuff that was real and that was important and that mattered…

And then there was stuff on the internet.

The Internet was a fantasy world; it wasn’t a real world. People on the internet weren’t real people. That was the fun. They were characters. Characters being played by real people perhaps, but characters nonetheless.

This wild and wacky internet still exists to some extent (anonymous jerks and trolls still throng around) but it’s shrinking. It’s being crowded out by internet banking and e-commerce; it’s being replaced with social networking, where people have real names and real relationships, because they’re real people. Can’t the two internets co-exist? The internet may have infinite space, but people have limited hours, and they’re spending them differently.

It’s not as much of a game anymore, because when you post something from a Facebook profile, real friends can take real offence. Real crooks can steal real money from real bank accounts.

The real world is bleeding in, and it’s going to get worse. Taxes. Libel suits. Angry employers tracking what you post, when you post.

Certain aspects of the change will have to be approached carefully, because certain concepts just aren’t the same online.

Distance doesn’t exist on the internet. Well, maybe distance does exist, but it follows different rules entirely than physical distance. But these rules are going to be studied and mapped and understood, because the stakes are just too high.

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