Skill Set: Blogging
An intro to spreading your voice online.
By Ezra Klein
Thursday January 4, 2007
Blogs. You can’t escape them. The name sounds like something a five-year-old extracts from his nose, but the medium has unearthed scandals, raised millions of dollars, disgraced legendary newsmen, helped elect senators, birthed books, made movies, and commanded endless media attention. Moreover, a vast swath of the political class now uses them daily: Campaigns and magazines and interest groups and lobbies and unions and newspapers and radio shows and anyone else with an idea to peddle or brand to promote has entered the blogosphere, and if you want a job with these folks, you’d be well-served to seek some familiarity. So here’s a quick primer to what you should already know about blogging.
Que Es? According to Wikipedia (which is, I hasten to add, a “wiki,” not a blog), the world “blog” was invented in April or May of 1999 by Peter Merholz, and was a contraction of the term “web log,” which was coined by Jorn Barger in December of 1997. Also according to Wikipedia, early bloggers called themselves “escribitionists.”
But despite the aura of newness, blogs are little more than words on a screen. You put up words, and if you’re lucky, other people comment on them. The topic can be anything from your cat to your hat to Hillary Clinton to health policy. I like the last.
Where To Blog: The only real question with a blog is the architecture you use to put your words on the screen. The simplest route is through Blogspot.com, a free service owned by Google that’ll allow you to pick a name (e.g. yourname.blogspot.com), choose a ready-made template, and start posting. The tradeoff for being free and simple, however, is a lack of flexibility, back-end tools, and design options. But it’s a great place to begin.
For the slightly more advanced online wordsmith, Typepad.com also offers ease of use, but with quite a bit more back-end power and design freedom. Typepad will host and, while you can use their templates, you can also build from scratch on their servers, keep the pieces of their code you desire, trash the bits you don’t, and generally have a grand old time. But Typepad costs money.
Finally, there’s the way of the real technological superstar: Building your own site from scratch, installing the Moveable Type or Wordpress architecture yourself, and finding some hosting space. You must feel real good about yourself, you geek.
Writing: The beauty and curse of blogging is that there’s no hegemonic style guide. We don’t follow Associated Press conventions, we don’t even all capitalize (and don’t get I started on grammar and speling). Blogging has a reputation for informality, and that’s indeed the norm, but if you feel better eschewing all contractions and avoiding the personal pronoun then, like, follow your bliss, man. The blogosphere embraces everyone from stream of consciousness stylists doing an unintentional and unappreciated Joyce impression to loving crafters of prose (like Digby), professional journalists (like Josh Marshall), academics, quoters, linkers, essayists, takedown artists, and 12-year-olds. You’ve got to find the style that’s enjoyable for you to write in and suitable for the audience you wish to attract (if you’re hoping journalists and politicos will read you, I’d use paragraph breaks and periods.) And, as your comfort with the medium increases, your voice will emerge, solidify, and sharpen.
Content, of course, is another story. Your central challenge will be remaining fresh, original, and vibrant. That’s easy enough on the first day, and even on the tenth, but a few months of daily writing and you’ll begin having grinding periods where the news stories refuse to inspire and world events remain stubbornly sleepy. Unshackle yourself from providing mere commentary; the best blogs offer illumination, as well as information. If your readers merely wanted the news, they could read the news. What you can offer is a take, and more to the point, depth and context. So don’t be afraid to delve into the policy, to search for scholarly research, to post up data and graphs, to search Lexis-Nexis for historical parallels or past contradictions. The question isn’t how many interesting news stories you can find, but how much value, context, and depth you can add to them. When you can work off knowledge rather than always requiring inspiration, your slow days will become much more bearable, both for you and your readers.
Gone Publicizin’: If a blogger posts about a tree falling, but nobody reads it, did he really make a sound? For some of you, roping in unsuspecting web surfers to peruse your innermost thoughts isn’t part of the plan. But for those of you do believe the world aches for your delightful, incisive commentary, attracting a readership is of foremost concern. So a few tips:
• Do not just blast e-mail the biggest bloggers. Their universe contains far too many blogs they should already be linking to. Your offer to put them on your side bar in exchange for a reciprocal link has nothing in it for them. If you want their notice, write a brilliant post and occasionally send that post and only that post along. And even then, you may not get a link. Which is fine. It may seem that an Atrios reference and the 6,000 viewers it sends will catapult your readership, but it will do so only for a day. Those folks generally don’t stick around, and so, 72-hours later, it’s as if the link never happened.
• Indeed, the mistake most new blogs make is they seek to get noticed by big bloggers, rather than small ones. If you’ve got ten daily readers, and another blog has 250, there’s much to be gained by striking up a relationship there. The other blog is still plenty small enough to appreciate the notice and attention, and it’s got a dedicated group of readers willing to hang out on smaller sites. Build yourself through other blogs of somewhat similar, but slightly larger, readerships—it’s both more rewarding in the conversations you’ll be able to trigger, and more lucrative in the readers you’ll get.
• Leave comments on other, bigger blogs, and make your name link to your blog. This is easy enough to do, an almost universal feature of commenting software. If your commentary is witty and brilliant, other commenters will click through.
• Develop an expertise. It’s unlikely that you are such a gorgeous prose stylist or cunning political analyst that you’ll outshine the competition based on sheer talent alone. So learn about something. Read the research, scour the think tanks, dig through the literature. Become a go-to guy on a subject of your choice—energy, health care, the history of progressivism, whatever—and use that grounding to add value to your commentary. A nice side benefit of this is that you’ll actually become smarter while doing it, and casual readers, not to mention beautiful, libidinous ones, will be impressed.
• Join group blogs. A variety of well-read sites, from Campus Progress to DailyKos, now let users post their own blogs, or diaries, or items. Take advantage of these built-in audiences and post or cross-post to the communities they frequent. This gives you an instant readership that can, if you impress them, be convinced to also read your personal venture.
And Don’t Stress: Blogging should be fun. It’s unlikely to make you a superstar, but it’ll undoubtedly make you a better writer and a clearer thinker. The very act of providing regular content for an audience—real or imagined, big or small—forces you to stretch and read and create at a pace you’d never otherwise match. In the end, that’s the real utility of blogging: making you think harder. Plus, blogs are already obsolete. The kids are all podcasting and YouTubing and stripping on webcams. So enjoy your dimming moment in the sun.
Ezra Klein is the writing fellow at The American Prospect. His blog is at www.EzraKlein.com.
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Comments
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please to tell me where these kids are stripping on webcams? (I kid… lol… how’s that for getting attention?)
great article… thanks for the advice…
— Pete Bogs - Jan 19, 08:44 AM - #