The Challenge

A little something on Blog’s nature

Published by Esteban Glas on January 7th, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: Blog Design, Blogs, Web

Once again credit must be given to Krista for pointing out to the rest of the world an excellent blog; Guy Kawasaki’s.

She referenced this article in which Guy reviews his first year blogging. An excellent post overall, but what caught my attention and had me thinking was point number 9 in his list:

Most disappointing realization: After a week, most postings are “gone.” Perhaps people’s expectations of blogs are so low that they don’t consider them reference sources. Hence, I have to write another book. My challenge is that I have three tasks: answering email, blogging, and writing a book, and I can only do two.

Sad but true. So I wondered why is it that this happens? I could come up with a short list of reasons, and we’re all guilty! I also suggest some “fixes” that came out of my head.
1. What we use for searching.
All blog search engines I use have the same way of sorting blog posts and presenting them set as default: date. Technorati and google blog search, to name just a couple do it the same way. Probably a post written 2 months ago is what we’re after, but we’ll never see it since there’s no way we’re going to browse through 20 pages of search results. Maybe it’s time for blog searches to start giving us innovative ways to sort results for a query; here’s one for you: sort based on the number of Diggs and del.icio.us tags.

2. The way blogs post.
When I hit the publish button for this post it is going to appear first in my page. In this case that might note be that bad, since I think this post might be worth something. But a lot of other times my posts are; well, uninteresting. The worst thing is that the “interesting posts will eventually get buried by newer stuff into whatever place recycled bytes rest in peace. The same principle applies to feeds. There might be some workouts for this (which I plan to implement sometime in the future here), which involve making up lists or pages of “important” previous posts organized in any criteria which is relevant for you. This might be solely personal, based on comments or links or whatever suits you. My advice would be to keep those lists short (10 posts) and categorized, keep them visible, update them frequently and provide a feed for them.

3. The tools we use.
Many “blog promotion” tools we use are based on latest post. I’ll give an example. For this site I use Google Sitemaps, a nice plugin that creates an XML; you can see mine here. This XML helps google, yahoo and MSN to index my site. There are several figures like “Change Frequencies” and “Priorities” that tell the engines newer posts are better than older… You might need to tweak “promotion” plugins for them to keep old, relevant posts alive.

Final Word.
Blogs work this way. Since they have appeared their very nature is that newer posts get more attention than older, which have a tendency to fade away. It’s just like that; it will not change and that’s OK. But we can do things to try to keep material that we think is worth sharing alive. It might only take some creativity.

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