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
