THE END
Well, this blogging business was a bit of an experiment for me. It hasn't managed to engage my enthusiasm for very long, so I've decided to quit doing it. I suppose I owe those of you that have bothered to come here an explanation, so here are the reasons:-
1] It became a real chore to write here. As I suspected, writing took longer than just commenting on other blog sites due to the need to fact-check what I was writing, provide links, check spelling and so on. To be quite frank I've got better things to do with my time, not least of which is starting up my own company.
2] Not enough people came here to make it worthwhile. That in itself wasn't a problem, because I didn't exactly try hard to publicise it. In order to get a blog site publicised you need to increase its "weight" so that search engines find it more readily. This is done by making sure that other sites have your links on them. Most bloggers achieve this by running around posting on all kinds of other blogs. To some extent this is self-defeating, because the more you try to raise your own profile by posting on other blogs, the more those other blogs have THEIR profile raised thus pushing your own profile to the bottom. It also means that a lot of the postings on blogs sites are there purely for reasons of self-promotion rather than to contribute anything worthwhile in the comments. A good example of this is the comment by "George Street" in the comments of my last post here, which was obviously intended purely to promote his own blog. I'm not bitter about that at all, its just that it has revealed to me the way that "Blogging" actually works. Too much of it is just "blogging incest" - bloggers linking to bloggers purely to get their blog rated more highly on Google. A lot of blogging mutual back-scratching activity, but is there much else besides?
3] It wasn't going to get any better. Guido likes to claim he has 350,000 unique visitors a month. This is bullshit as far as I can see. Due to "Native address translation" it is very difficult to judge how many visits you get based purely on IP addresses. You probably get a new IP address every day when you log in - so 350,000 unique IP addresses over a month would correspond to about 12,000 unique visitors. Looking at this another way, back in tho old days when you had forums, you could see how many posts there were and how many people had read those posts (being as there was not a lot of point in reading the same posts over and over again). Rarely did you get more than 100 readers for each comment posted. Thus it implies that in the world of the internet, for every 100 people reading a webpage, only 1% actually post. This means that you can get an idea of the number of readers from the number of people commenting. I would say that Guido has about 100 people commenting, which implies a maximum of 10,000 regular readers. That's actually pretty good for a one-man-band single issue media - the far bigger Guardian newspaper is bought by just 450,000 people, but it isn't nearly as big as he would like to imply! Now the fact is that Guido is by far the most popular politics blog and is likely to remain so. Other blogs just can't compete. Most of the "serious" political blogs out there have about 100 regular readers, I would say. I'm not sure that's enough potential readers to keep me wanting to preach to them. Which leads me onto my next issue....
4] I recently posted a comment on another blogsite which was really annoying. No, it wasn't the comment that was really annoying, it was the fact that I re-iterated the same point. The thing is that although the comment was read by the same people, not one of them had taken on board what I had to say the first time. Which was a shame, since what I was saying wasn't anything to do with "opinion", which people are entitled to ignore - it was simply a cast-iron FACT. If people reading blog-sites are not open to worthwhile cast-iron FACTs then there is precious little point in writing stuff for them to read anyway! Most of what I am writing here are just opinions, with a few facts scattered about. If people aren't open to my facts, they certainly aren't going to be open to my opinions. Unfortunately, this means that those people that have shown an interest in my blog already agree with me to a great extent, which is nice, but it means I am merely preaching to a handful of the converted. I'm not even sure who these "converted" really are. Its not like we are meeting down the pub and discussing politics. Probably you are all good folk - but maybe you're not! Maybe you are all on the internet from the local mental hospital. Impossible to say, isn't it? Problem is that if you keep preaching to people that agree with you anyway, you are contributing to their "confirmational bias", and your own. I'm not like that personally, I prefer to have my opinions challenged, so I can test how good my opinions really are. Continually communicating with people that just agree with you could lead to madness, like those loons that talk each other into believing the end of the world is coming.
I think this experiment has been worthwhile for me. It has shown me what political blogging is all about in this country. It is really about entertaining a few thousand like-minded people (predominantly Tories and BNP supporters) that want to have a good old swearing rant about the failings of the incumbent government. I'm not even sure that this is a good idea - maybe this just acts as a safety release valve for genuine anger that should be exhibited in the real world rather than the virtual world. Maybe that's why we don't get so many people angry on our streets anymore. Maybe that's why the government isn't really looking to clamp down on sites like Devil's Kitchen - because its better that people swear at Gordon on the net than in real life in front of the TV cameras. It may also give a rather distorted picture of what the average Joe in the real world is actually thinking. It's all good fun, but it's not terribly important.
As far as discussing politics "seriously" then forget it. Unless you find that "getting things off your chest" does you good - in which case it might be good therapy. I enjoy having a good rant on Guido's site too (but perhaps it would be better if I spent the same time having a rant at my local MP.....).
I had hoped that I would get a few more readers building up over time and some of my better quality ideas might turn out to be quite influential and spread more widely. I used to notice people picking up my ideas when I commented on the Guardian's CiF site, but this just isn't ever going to happen here. It really isn't how blogging works. Blogging is all about entertaining people in a superficial way, people that already agree with you.
So I'm going back to the entertaining business of having a rant on Guido's blog. Sometimes I might even post the odd serious comment there too - after all, there's a chance that someone might actually read it there! I'll probably drop the "schadenfreude" tag too - its far too long and whilst it was for a while good fun to laugh at Gordon Brown's misfortunes the situation is now far too serious and his misfortunes are likely to be my misfortunes too.
So goodbye, and remember - this is just one less politics blog you will feel the need to waste your time visiting, so its a good thing all round really!
1] It became a real chore to write here. As I suspected, writing took longer than just commenting on other blog sites due to the need to fact-check what I was writing, provide links, check spelling and so on. To be quite frank I've got better things to do with my time, not least of which is starting up my own company.
2] Not enough people came here to make it worthwhile. That in itself wasn't a problem, because I didn't exactly try hard to publicise it. In order to get a blog site publicised you need to increase its "weight" so that search engines find it more readily. This is done by making sure that other sites have your links on them. Most bloggers achieve this by running around posting on all kinds of other blogs. To some extent this is self-defeating, because the more you try to raise your own profile by posting on other blogs, the more those other blogs have THEIR profile raised thus pushing your own profile to the bottom. It also means that a lot of the postings on blogs sites are there purely for reasons of self-promotion rather than to contribute anything worthwhile in the comments. A good example of this is the comment by "George Street" in the comments of my last post here, which was obviously intended purely to promote his own blog. I'm not bitter about that at all, its just that it has revealed to me the way that "Blogging" actually works. Too much of it is just "blogging incest" - bloggers linking to bloggers purely to get their blog rated more highly on Google. A lot of blogging mutual back-scratching activity, but is there much else besides?
3] It wasn't going to get any better. Guido likes to claim he has 350,000 unique visitors a month. This is bullshit as far as I can see. Due to "Native address translation" it is very difficult to judge how many visits you get based purely on IP addresses. You probably get a new IP address every day when you log in - so 350,000 unique IP addresses over a month would correspond to about 12,000 unique visitors. Looking at this another way, back in tho old days when you had forums, you could see how many posts there were and how many people had read those posts (being as there was not a lot of point in reading the same posts over and over again). Rarely did you get more than 100 readers for each comment posted. Thus it implies that in the world of the internet, for every 100 people reading a webpage, only 1% actually post. This means that you can get an idea of the number of readers from the number of people commenting. I would say that Guido has about 100 people commenting, which implies a maximum of 10,000 regular readers. That's actually pretty good for a one-man-band single issue media - the far bigger Guardian newspaper is bought by just 450,000 people, but it isn't nearly as big as he would like to imply! Now the fact is that Guido is by far the most popular politics blog and is likely to remain so. Other blogs just can't compete. Most of the "serious" political blogs out there have about 100 regular readers, I would say. I'm not sure that's enough potential readers to keep me wanting to preach to them. Which leads me onto my next issue....
4] I recently posted a comment on another blogsite which was really annoying. No, it wasn't the comment that was really annoying, it was the fact that I re-iterated the same point. The thing is that although the comment was read by the same people, not one of them had taken on board what I had to say the first time. Which was a shame, since what I was saying wasn't anything to do with "opinion", which people are entitled to ignore - it was simply a cast-iron FACT. If people reading blog-sites are not open to worthwhile cast-iron FACTs then there is precious little point in writing stuff for them to read anyway! Most of what I am writing here are just opinions, with a few facts scattered about. If people aren't open to my facts, they certainly aren't going to be open to my opinions. Unfortunately, this means that those people that have shown an interest in my blog already agree with me to a great extent, which is nice, but it means I am merely preaching to a handful of the converted. I'm not even sure who these "converted" really are. Its not like we are meeting down the pub and discussing politics. Probably you are all good folk - but maybe you're not! Maybe you are all on the internet from the local mental hospital. Impossible to say, isn't it? Problem is that if you keep preaching to people that agree with you anyway, you are contributing to their "confirmational bias", and your own. I'm not like that personally, I prefer to have my opinions challenged, so I can test how good my opinions really are. Continually communicating with people that just agree with you could lead to madness, like those loons that talk each other into believing the end of the world is coming.
I think this experiment has been worthwhile for me. It has shown me what political blogging is all about in this country. It is really about entertaining a few thousand like-minded people (predominantly Tories and BNP supporters) that want to have a good old swearing rant about the failings of the incumbent government. I'm not even sure that this is a good idea - maybe this just acts as a safety release valve for genuine anger that should be exhibited in the real world rather than the virtual world. Maybe that's why we don't get so many people angry on our streets anymore. Maybe that's why the government isn't really looking to clamp down on sites like Devil's Kitchen - because its better that people swear at Gordon on the net than in real life in front of the TV cameras. It may also give a rather distorted picture of what the average Joe in the real world is actually thinking. It's all good fun, but it's not terribly important.
As far as discussing politics "seriously" then forget it. Unless you find that "getting things off your chest" does you good - in which case it might be good therapy. I enjoy having a good rant on Guido's site too (but perhaps it would be better if I spent the same time having a rant at my local MP.....).
I had hoped that I would get a few more readers building up over time and some of my better quality ideas might turn out to be quite influential and spread more widely. I used to notice people picking up my ideas when I commented on the Guardian's CiF site, but this just isn't ever going to happen here. It really isn't how blogging works. Blogging is all about entertaining people in a superficial way, people that already agree with you.
So I'm going back to the entertaining business of having a rant on Guido's blog. Sometimes I might even post the odd serious comment there too - after all, there's a chance that someone might actually read it there! I'll probably drop the "schadenfreude" tag too - its far too long and whilst it was for a while good fun to laugh at Gordon Brown's misfortunes the situation is now far too serious and his misfortunes are likely to be my misfortunes too.
So goodbye, and remember - this is just one less politics blog you will feel the need to waste your time visiting, so its a good thing all round really!
posted by Schadenfreude at
10:32
11 Comments:
A pity as I had greatly enjoyed reading (and learning much from) what I found here. Nonetheless I shall look out for your inestimable contibutions elsewhere. Do give us a clue as to what you will rename yourself.
Bon Voyage.
A shame, I was learning ideas from you. But yes, getting and assessing feedback is a problem - and I understand it's the same for newspapers. Good luck with the business - can you give us a clue as to what field you'll be working in?
nomad &sackers: I'm glad you have learned something from what I have written. I had a lot more to write, but it simply takes too long. I'm married, with two very active boys and one of those jobs that requires a fair amount of commitment. I simply can't spend half a day writing this stuff. The last post I did took that long. Problem is you need to check so much stuff. You need to think "does kitchen sink drama really mean what I think it means?". So you go off and check, and read for half an hour - and that's for maybe half a paragraph in the final copy! My last post was about 2000words - but it was half as long as I wanted it to be! It was difficult to split things up too.
I don't think blogging lends itself to "earnest" political writing. Although I have a lot of stuff I wanted to write, trying to put it out a few times a week was too challenging, because of the time involved, and as I say, I want to do other things. I think if you want to blog, my feeling is that you should do the following:-
1] Work as part of a team of perhaps 5 people
2] Just make it funny and entertaining. No one wants to do "serious" these days. Not even me.
3] Give it a name that "does what it says on the tin". Not something obscure. Make it grab people's attention, perhaps using sex or something similar
4] Post regularly, ideally 7 days a week, but only one post a day.
5] Keep posts short, 500 words max.
6] Keep a backlog of material to ensure you can meet [4]
7] Make sure its genuinely funny and not repetitive. Swear rants are pretty dull after a few posts. I think that's why Devil's Kitchen is really struggling now.
8] Remember that all politicians really are the same.
considering 2],3] &4] I would say a satirical news blog called something like "The Naked Politicians Poo-Hole" would be a big hit. If you look at Guido's site, it's actually a bit dull. It's the commenters that make it worth reading because some of them are very witty. Take some of that humour and unleash it on ALL the news in a non-partisan way and you'd have a succesful blog, I think.
I think that pure political blogging is rather over-rated. A lot of the sites in the US that the MSM here consider as "blog-sites" are nothing of the sort. They are either transcripts of radio programmes presented by US radio "shock-jocks" or they are news aggregation sites like the "Drudge Report". Comparing Iain Dale with the Drudge Report is daft - its comparing apples and oranges. They also vastly over-estimate their own readership in the same way that Guido does.If yuo want to check how many readers you've really got, try creating two blogs, with the latest post on one blog interrupted half-way through with a MORE button. Readers have to click the "more" button to read the rest of the post. Put the rest of the post on a new clean web-page/blog page and put the sitemeter there. This way you will know absolutely for sure just how many people are genuinely reading your posts. Don't delude yourself - if you aren't getting more than a handful of readers you are writing mostly for your own joy in writing and not much more.
I may revisit this in the future, but not in the same format. I might put all my political ideas together over a long period into a kind of "book" as you suggested Sackers, but just publish it on the web as a complete dissertation. That makes it much easier to make full use of all the HTML features with photos and so on and take the time to do things right without the pressure of regular posting. Then I'll link to it later when I post on other blogs. I have a sizeable maount of free web-space to allow me to do this with my ADSL account.
When I post elsewhere I will probably use the name Ryan, but will often post anonymously just because I can't be arsed to put a name or because I'm saying something outrageous out of pure devilment!
The new business will be related to the holiday industry, more than that I cannot say. The aim is to launch tentatively early in 2009 to get a feel for the demand for the service. Before then I have a lot of market research & competition analysis and paperwork to do - contracts, leaflets, pro-formas, legal, financial, software, photography, promotion, communications etc. The list of things you need to do to get a business off the ground is huge! My wife is keen to be involved, so that will help. It's good to do these things whilst I'm stillin valuable employment, but then again I am paid in my current job by 25% productivity incentive which pushes me to give a lot of time to my employer - difficult to juggle both. But I'm not convinced my job will last out much longer, so I'm hoping to get the new business up and running to keep me in the manner to which I have so readily become accustomed.
I was enjoying it!
I just bash my posts out without thinking and I suppose it shows but I don't do it for anyone else just for my own satisfaction. As for your ratings I would be surprised if the likes of Technorati have even caught up with you properly!
I think your idea of a collective is good - maybe better bloggers will mutate into a sort of collective electric newspaper.
I shouldn't measure your success by visitor numbers, any more than you would with friendship. But it's clear from what you've done so far that you're trying to see the big picture, rather than comment-as-you-go, and I do hope you keep the notion of a book on the back burner. Vision and perspective are always valuable. But smart of you to make a decision about best use of time - suggests you won't be a victim of ego-traps in business.
Best wishes for your future success.
well I started by wishing you luck, and I shall finish the same way !
Sackers is right, as ever.
adiós, Mr *Ryan*
I've read all your posts. I disagree with lots of it, but you think about what interests me, and so you are a personal loss. More importantly, losing bloggers who debunk the self righteousness and myths of the Left is a public loss. Do reconsider.
I too enjoyed it whilst it lasted.
You seem very down on it now which is not good.
Not sure why lack of viewers is an issue for you. Unless you're in it for money (advertisment), which does not seem your motivation, why do numbers matter? Did you expect/want regular and effusive praise in the comments to keep you going?
There could be a whole psychological analysis of this (brief) blog in the same manner as your own psychological analyses of polical theories, etc:
It quickly believed, without giving itself long to tell, that it might not be massively popular/the biggest/a big influence on others/etc. It judged success by these variable and so believed it failed/might fail. It gave up. This means that the market (i.e. internet-browsers like me) will have no alternative but to use its resources (i.e. time on boring computers) on other, inferior sites.
Is this not similar to the way many smaller businesses give up in the face of the ever-growing biggest ones in the capitalist system? Is this a good thing?
I believe your blog is successful/rewarding in its own way. There are several very satisfied regular viewers who have bothered to say so, and many others who have not bothered to comment, including me, but who have greatly enjoyed it.
Also not sure how you assume that all viewers must already have same views - you can never know this.
I did think that it must take up a lot of your time - boring computers should not suck up too much of it. Could you not perhaps post when you have the time/inclination, as many other blogs do? I would keep it in my bookmarks to check regularly..
BE: "I just bash my posts out without thinking and I suppose it shows but I don't do it for anyone else just for my own satisfaction"
As good a reason for writing as any. Unfortunately I rarely get the urge to write from my own initiative, but more often in response to others writing.
Sackers: " I do hope you keep the notion of a book on the back burner"
Freed from the PRESSURE of having to write RIGHT NOW, I am actually slightly more enthusiastic about writing! I think what I might do is write everything down first and then present it in a serialised form when its good and ready. Don't want to let everyone down...
HG: "More importantly, losing bloggers who debunk the self righteousness and myths of the Left is a public loss."
True. But I am of the belief that POLITICAL PARTIES are all much the same, and have been since the coalition governmnet of WWII, when lines between to ideals were blurred forever. I am rather less partisan now. The Guardianistas are nothing more than a personality type. IQ between 110 and 120 I would say. Intelligent enough to realise they are smarter than most, but not intelligent enough to realise how stupid they really are. They should play more chess. Perhaps everyone should. Nothing like chess for teaching people the unexpected consequences of badly thought out actions....
ND: Thanks again.
CJ: I'm not really down on it. I was kind of pushed into it, which meant there wasn't really enough enthusiasm there right from the start. I wish I had done a little more market research before I started. It is good that there are some satisfied readers here. Actually I perhaps would have preferred more discussion, because I don't think I have EVERYTHING right (as HG has suggested). I wanted to do something different. I wanted to look at the whole system and say why it was crap and wouldn't ever work. I wanted to show why all the parties were just as bad. I wanted to point out the flaws in the way our society operates and indiacte ways in which it might be improved. I didn't want everyone in Britain to read it, but I had hoped that over time enough people in the blogosphere might read it, that they would pick up the "good" ideas I had and drop the rest, and the good ones might actually become fairly influential, by word of blog mouth. Unfortunately there are some great blogs out there (Sackers "Bearwatch" for instance) that provide a great service but just aren't read by enough people to really have the influence they deserve. And if they have been around for a while and aren't read by that many people, what are the chances of yet another political blog making the grade? I felt it was pretty slim. Better to post my remarks on CiF or GF if I want them to be read and perhaps picked up by others. I have already seen that happen with some things I have written in the past. If they are good enough they start to show the characteristics of memes.
But I am thinking that I will come back to this again, but AFTER I have drawn all my material together, not before. It will be less pressured this way and less of a chore. Hopefully the world won't come apart at the seams and Nick Griffin be elected president for life in the meantime....
Well i think the posts are good so don't delete them.
As for popularity I spent months getting maybe 50 readers a day, it takes time to build up - as with any word of mouth venture.
Think of it like your new company, you won't get 7 figure turnover in year one; it takes time.
Hope to see you around the blogosphere.
CU: Thanks. I won't delete the posts. As I say, I'm likely to come back to this but taking a different approach.
As with starting a new company, it is wise to do significant market research before launching! Since the cost to me was nothing, I consider what I have done so far as "an experimental prototype". I got the technicalities sorted out OK, but the details of presentation need more work! So I will be back when I'm good and ready, by which time I hope what I write will be far better than it is now. I'm already collecting key quotations and links for "the finished product". Hopefully it will be back in a year or so.
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