
The problem with blogging - wheels
http://swombat.com/2011/5/26/real-value-web
======
kylemaxwell
So there are at least two separate use cases that get shoved into blogging.

The first (and probably most useful) treats the blog as something like a
diary: commentary on current events at some scale, e.g. personal,
professional, news, et cetera. In this case, older content really does have
much less relevance because the events themselves now live in the past. Your
friends /might/ care about what you drank last night, but they almost
certainly don't care about 5 months 12 days ago. You might want to comment on
Linus' latest mailing list screed, but it might not matter for kernel-dabbling
four years down the road.

The second use case seems to be where Daniel Tenner really is chewing on
something. If you're writing new stuff that doesn't necessarily live in the
moment - musings on philosophy or cool data structures or life advice or Paul
Graham's articles - then the blog model doesn't fit as well. Newer posts don't
matter more than older posts, and in fact might matter less.

Thinking on this, we also have the issue of serendipity. The writer has
probably created other stuff that you might like reading even if it's not
directly about the exact same topic. Seems like the sort of thing attacked by
collaborative filtering and other methods. Combine that with a CMS-style
knowledge architecture (e.g. structure by something other than chronology if
chronology doesn't make sense), and you're getting somewhere.

~~~
swombat
Very well analysed. And I definitely agree about serendipity. That's a huge
concern for me, and one reason why I haven't categorised the Founder's Library
section yet. Splitting it into categories like the excellent
<http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive> makes a lot of
sense, but it almost completely takes away the serendipitous aspect, which is
essential for startup advice.

The article you really should read is often not the one you're looking for. A
system that makes it too easy to find what you think you need might
paradoxically make it harder to stumble onto what you actually needed.

I also think that almost every great blogger who starts with the first use
case ends up posting numerous timeless gems that get lost in the diary format.
DaringFireball is, again, the obvious example.

~~~
kylemaxwell
So maybe we as bloggers need to think more about curating our content.
Organizing past posts into relevant series, maybe: if I've written several
times about reverse engineering malware in a blog that ranges widely over the
topic of incident response, then readers who like one post would probably like
pointers to other posts. Having one or two "possibly related posts" doesn't
seem to really cover the need here. So I'm not quite sure how to go about
fixing the issue.

~~~
nigelsampson
Series was one thing I added to my blog as a way to group posts into a ordered
series and so to let people see related content. I think its become very
useful.

------
tptacek
This is something Patrick McKenzie has been saying here for almost a year now,
and is part of the reason we stopped blogging despite having developed an
audience.

Another thing that devalues blog content, where the same ideas and prose would
be more valuable in another venue, is that they present pieces as inherently
incomplete. Example: blog commenting, which encourage readers to see pieces
not as fully developed ideas but simply as fodder for a conversation. That's
great when a conversation is really what you wanted, but it's terrible when it
results in your work being scored by the lowest common denominator of your
comments.

Daring Fireball works because _that's his job_. It is the point of the site to
be a carefully analyzed news bulletin.

But when you're (say) a software company with a product and, possibly as a
result of that product, some interesting ideas about software, technology,
products or what-have-you, a timely news bulletin is not your job, and if
you're going to publish, you should do it in a way that optimizes the value of
those ideas.

For our part, I'd like to reorganize and rewrite our blog posts into a book;
start with a TOC, fill in the blanks with posts, let it be incomplete, and
build it up over time. But I'd also like to get product shipped.

~~~
euroclydon
I'm curious when Patrick changed his mind or what the nuances of this strategy
are.

<http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.463855.7>

~~~
tptacek
When I first met Patrick in person, 2 years ago, he was at pains to
demonstrate the power of the "linkerati" --- the fact that when a term was
used in one way by 99.99% of people, and in another way by Internet people,
the Internet people way would dominate Google. I remember blogs being pointed
out as a way to capitalize on that trend, because of the outsized search
impact of being part of the blog network.

Since then, Patrick has discovered his bill rate, and I'm just speculating
here but I'm guessing he's discovered that the value of being "of the
linkerati", while palpable, is _way way way_ below his bill rate, or the value
of his work product when he builds scalable link generation systems.

~~~
euroclydon
I get your second paragraph - it's more effective for him to use his time to
programatically generate thousands of pages then to write one, but your first?
If 99% of people use a certain terminology, and if you are selling, don't you
want to speak their language since they constitute the market? Or are you
saying you need to speak the blogger/technocratti so they'll link to you?

------
saraid216
Stop treating your posts chronologically, then. Call them essays and make a
categorical listing.

~~~
_delirium
I remember being really confused over the chronological ordering for non-
diaries when it first become common, and am still not that sure it's the right
thing, though it does have benefits for technological convenience (blog
software) and lower activation energy (just "write a blog post"). It used to
be common to have websites, and then a website might have a "recent updates"
or "new articles" page with a reverse-chronologically-ordered list of recent
updates, often named new.html or updates.html or something. But it wasn't the
main site; just something for frequent visitors to check.

But sometime around 2000-2003 or so, people just started throwing up
_everything_ on the equivalent of the "new articles" page! Seemed sort of a
strange way to organize anything that wasn't a livejournal. Also seems to
indicate a bit of a reduction in long-term ambition: people used to see
building a website as an incremental endeavor, where you were slowly building
up an edifice, so there was a clear separation between the long-term goal for
the site (a resource w/ information presented logically) and the order in
which you happened to add each piece (the recent-updates page).

Wikis still have that edifice-building angle (the "Recent Changes" page is
clearly not the main page), so maybe it's just that they've taken over that
role so completely that the only non-wiki things left are blogs and webapps,
with no more "regular" websites?

------
nikcub
Interesting post - completely agree with it. It isn't just with individual
blogs, it is with all blogs and content on the web. The number of RSS
subscribers has drastically decreased in the past few years - and it has been
replaced by Twitter, Facebook, HN, Techmeme et al.

Each of these sites emphasizes the _now_ \- to the extent that a 12 hour old
story is old news. An entire story thread can surface and then disappear in a
span of time that doesn't even last through the major global timezones (in
Australia I often miss big stories because they are only up top for a matter
of hours on US time)

So it isn't just the individual blogging model that needs to adapt, it is also
the way aggregators and clients work. Everybody seems to be stuck focusing on
what has happen in the past few hours.

A few years ago I wrote on Techcrunch about 'relevance over time'[1] and how
the blogs, twitter etc. need to adapt. None of the solutions have seemed to
work, and all that means is that if you are a blogger and do not have a
regular audience that checks your blog regularly, you are only going to get a
decent number of readers for the odd post that surfaces its way up onto one of
the large aggregators

I think that the new distributed social network will become the new blogging
model - where you can pub and sub and not rely on aggregators that are
tailored for a mass audience to find content. I am disappointed that all the
new 'facebook alternative' projects are just about replacing or complementing
facebook, rather than re-thinking the entire space of personal publishing. I
miss the old blogosphere and would like to see it reborn in some way.

Edit: and as an example, I to manually tweet this comment. It doesn't appear
on my blog, you can't reply to it from your own blog, and within 6 hours it
will be long forgotten and we will have the same conversation again in 3
months time.

[1] <http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/12/relevance-over-time/>

and followup:

[2] <http://nikcub.appspot.com/relevance-time-for-twitter>

------
dpcan
One can tell the difference between spam and non-spam on twitter. It's grossly
obvious. We've probably all followed someone and found out a couple days later
that they are just a robot spamming machine and un-followed.

I checked out @swombat, and it's clear he's real, and not a bot, so having a
bot sneak in a post back to past blog posts of value would hardly, if at all,
be considered spam.

Some people get confused, particularly our friends who are just looking out
for us, but a little blatant self-promotion is not always spam, and it's often
times understood that it's a necessary evil so we can stay in business and
keep doing the good we do.

~~~
swombat
I sure hope so! Time will tell. I think one thing I was lucky to foresee right
is that I knew I would eventually want Twitter integration, so I saved each of
the original tweets along with the article. So when an article gets reposted
on Twitter, it's the original tweet that it went out with when it went up -
which should help make it feel even less spammy.

------
mcn
I think the lack of timeless* articles in content streams -- HN, Reddit,
Twitter, etc. -- is a serious problem. I'm imagining a middle-ground between a
subreddit and a longform.org for the topics I'm interested in, and think that
would be a significant improvement.

The "essays" format or similar can do a decent job of funneling me towards
timeless content once I am on a site looking for it (see Peter Norvig's
webpage for another example), but it really doesn't address the stream issue.

Good luck with your tweeting experiment.

*I'm really thinking of something weaker than timelessness: worthwhile over a matter of years, at least.

------
atlei
Very true; I realized this myself a couple of months ago, and reorganized my
blog as follows:

\- main page shows categories _and_ a chronological list of posts (I don't
post that often; if you do, maybe list the last 30-50 only ?) in the right
sidebar

\- each category gets an index-page with introduction and 3 articles
highlighted, and a a list of all articles in the category in the left sidebar.
The highlighted articles (new and old) should change every now and then, maybe
somewhat depending on "the latest fads" ?

\- most important (IMHO); go back to your old articles and update them,
especially hyperlinks - this will also aid the discovery of "evergreen
content"

In addition, you should probably also use tags (I don't, but that's just
because I'm lazy and don't have that many articles).

You may also collect related articles in e-books (I've done it with one of the
categories, but it is a lot of work) - less SEO value, but maybe more "reader
value" ?

(personally, for blogs like swombats and pg, I often follow the timelines and
read through the old stuff, bookmarking or saving the "golden nuggets" once
and for all)

------
rglover
The author makes a great point. I for one constantly find new blogs that I
love, but only take the time to go back a few pages. I think a great model to
encourage deeper reading is setting up the home page as an index (see:
spencerfry.com + paulgraham.com).

~~~
mkr-hn
Setting up a landing page on my blog (<http://mkronline.wordpress.com/>) was
the best thing I ever did. It gives people an introduction to the place rather
than tossing them into a list of posts.

------
Mz
In some sense, this is an issue I have been wrestling with for two websites I
own. They have been referred to as "blogs" for years when that was never the
intent or the technical format of either. I have added Wordpress blogs to both
sites and have wrestled with various questions like trying to give an overview
(not compatible with chronological/blogging format) and how to marry these
unrelated parts of the site. I finally recently came up with the next step
forward for how to organize one of the sites but there is still much work to
do. Glad to be reading this (both the link and the remarks here).

------
skybrian
This is what links are for. An evergreen article can be promoted by a tweet or
a more recent post that puts it into context and explains why it's relevant
today. History needs historians to direct people to it.

------
programminggeek
I think the reason that blogging gets a bit misused as a kind of catchall for
content is that it has the lowest barrier of entry to publish. Thus, what used
to be a traditional site or magazine or whatever is now just another "blog"
running wordpress or tumblr or posterous. Point being, the line gets blurry
when you are using a blogging system to deliver both long and short form
content on the same site.

------
duopixel
Lack of complaints are never an indicator of success. For this particular
case, I'd look at the total number of followers. It's easier making the
bothersome disappear (unfollowing) than to formulate a complaint to the
author.

If you want to retweet your old articles, do it in a curated (i.e. human
driven) way.

~~~
swombat
My Twitter follower trends didn't change when I started tweeting every article
(I did keep an eye on it). Also, the overall trend seems pretty good:
<http://twittercounter.com/compare/swombat/3month/followers> \- I will of
course continue to keep an eye on it.

------
nickedit247
It seems like a hard but worthwhile undertaking. I just discovered this site
through HN and now I'm following you on twitter so I don't think you're going
to have a problem

------
rkudeshi
This is one of the best reasons to add a "Related Posts" section at the bottom
of every blog post.

(WordPress has multiple plugins that can generate this automatically for you.)

------
bricestacey
This is why bloggers add table of contents or getting started pages.

~~~
swombat
That doesn't even begin to solve the problem. It helps new user onboarding,
not old content discovery. "Getting started" can fit, what, at a stretch, a
dozen posts. A reasonably old, quality blog will have many dozen posts which
are worth bringing forward. And a blog with links, like swombat.com or
daringfireball.net, will have many more.

~~~
akkartik
But nobody uses frontpages for content discovery. The front page of a blog is
good for just two questions:

a) For new users: is this site any good?

b) For existing users (who don't grok RSS, sigh): is there anything new?

You can try to do more. Lots of us have category pages[1]. But invariably they
get browsed by initial visitors so they fall into category a above.

Perhaps what you're saying is that every website needs a channel to bring
visitors back. And twitter may well be that channel. But bricestacey is right
that the frontpage is all about user onboarding simply because nobody uses it
for content discovery.

[1] Including myself: <http://akkartik.name>

~~~
swombat
Nobody uses front pages for content discovery because the front pages rarely
present the right interface or content for that. Maybe that can change...

I think that merely serving current/new users in this way is selling your
content short. It's the written equivalent of a news channel, instead of being
the evolution of the book. I'm hoping we can do better.

~~~
akkartik
_"I think that merely serving current/new users in this way is selling your
content short."_

I'm not convinced that's true. The big limitation of the frontpage is that
there's no way to remind people to return to it. Without that you'll only get
current/new users.

I totally agree we need a solution for content discovery. Like many others I
took my stab at building one (<http://readwarp.com>) I'm just not convinced
that the frontpage is the place for it.

------
fuscata
Sounds like he needs a wiki and a blog.

~~~
swombat
A wiki doesn't seem right either. When's the last time you've ever sat and
browsed through a wiki looking for awesome stuff you didn't know about?

Wikis, imho, are a bit like search engines. They're great for collecting stuff
that you want to find again, and they're great for finding stuff you're
looking for. Blogs have something more - they point you to stuff which you
never knew you could care about, they expand your interests. Wikis are a very
clumsy substitute.

I think what's needed is perhaps an evolution of the blog format.

~~~
fuscata
Actually I browse through wikis quite a bit, but maybe I'm not typical. In any
event, IMO, a blog (web log) is for just that: logging time-sensitive things,
like a journal or news feed. A wiki is for more permanent information, that
may be updated as needed, but stays put.

------
ignifero
The best way to go would be to use a wiki

------
bcardarella
#1 problem with blogging: not including comments on your blog for community
feedback.

