The Posterous Experiment
To freshen things up a little bit for me, I'm going to start playing around with a Posterous blog. If you haven't checked out Posterous, it's pretty slick, and pretty much the simplest way ever to start blogging - just blog by sending emails, it does the rest. It's integrated to handle images, videos, etc, and will post new content back out to Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc, too. My plan is to just dump the random daily stuff out to my Posterous blog, and leave this one for more traditional topics like you'd normally see here.
If you're interested in checking out my Posterous blog, visit http://chrishubbs.posterous.com/, or the RSS feed.
Still in queue at IntenseDebate
So I had planned on waiting to blog about this until it was all live, but, well, this is getting annoying. I've been looking into social commenting tools for a while now; Disqus and Intense Debate seem to be the two biggies at the moment. When I realized yesterday that Intense Debate had been purchased by Automattic (the folks behind WordPress), I figured it was the way to go for my WordPress blog. So I installed it and tried to get it up and running.
The signup and install are easy enough - create an account on intensedebate.com, then install their WordPress plugin and activate. At that point IntenseDebate is supposed to sync all my blog comments into their site, and then any further comments will automatically be saved both to my blog and to their site. (This is handy, because if I ever decide I want to get rid of them, I just deactivate the plugin, and all my comments are still in place on my blog.)
The sad part is this: I activated the plugin yesterday about 1300. They warned it might take a few hours to complete the import, and assured me that I would get an email when it was done. In the mean time their plugin is active on my blog, so any new comments are run through the IntenseDebate system and show up fine, but all the previously-posted comments are MIA until they get done importing. It's now almost 0800, and the status page still says "Queued, waiting for import."
I'm not sure what course to take at this point. I've posted a couple complainy replies on Twitter to @intensedebate, but have heard nothing back. (Not that I expect they must reply, but... well, that's another post.) I'll give it a full 24 hours to try to import, after that I'm calling it a big pile of FAIL and deactivating. Maybe I'll give Disqus a try then after all.
What’s this place about, anyway?
I've watched with interest the transformation of an internet acquaintance's blog over the past several months. In past years his blog has been, in many ways, similar to mine - intermittent family updates, pictures of the kids, occasional rants on music or politics, etc. I subscribed to the blog and enjoyed the occasional updates.
Then several months ago this acquaintance started a topical blog in earnest, then remade his personal blog as the beginning of an organized effort to try to help along the book he is writing. As I've followed the blog feed, I've seen him follow all the pro-blogger tips - posting at consistent, regular, intervals; asking questions to engage the audience; coming up with catchy titles for the posts; posting lots of multimedia; the list goes on and on. And here's the thing: while I wish him all the best with his blog and book efforts, I find myself not interested in his blog any more. It's no longer really about him so much as it is about his brand.
As I was thinking through this, I asked myself a question that's a good question for all bloggers who are hoping to attract readers: "Fill in the blank: I would recommend this blog to people who are interested in _____". The answer to that question gives you two things: (1) an idea of who to market your blog to, and (2) the type of content you should be writing to keep them coming back.
I'll let my book-writing friend work through those questions himself; I just want to turn the question back on myself. To whom would I recommend this blog? And the best answer I can come up with is: people who are interested in me, or in many of the same things I'm interested in.
Until the day I become a massive celebrity, this will naturally keep my readership small (though it's probably still larger than the quality of the content deserves!). And I'm OK with that - in fact, it's sort of a relief. When I keep my expectations low, I don't feel the pressure to serve the blog - the blog can serve me. And that's how it should be.
An odd correspondence of sorts
Abraham Piper writes a blog I quite enjoy over at Twenty-Two Words. He seems like a guy that I would quite enjoy. We've actually developed an email correspondence of sorts over the past few weeks. It has gone something like this:
Abraham: Your comment on my blog got flagged as spam. Sorry, I don't know why. I approved it for you.
Me: Thanks! I enjoy your blog.
Abraham: Your comment on my blog got flagged as spam again. Sorry, I don't know why. I approved it for you.
Me: Thanks! Keep up the blogging!
Abraham: Your comment on my blog got flagged as spam again. Sorry, I don't know why this keeps happening. I approved it for you.
Me: Why does wordpress.com hate me? Anyway, thanks! I'll keep commenting!
I'm sensing a theme here.
Abraham: maybe sometime we can exchange emails on a different topic. Until then, please keep blogging, and thanks in advance for resurrecting my comments.