A few thoughts spurred by the latest blogosphere pile-on*:
- Nothing in life is easy, most of all success (not that I’d know…). Very few people succeed without trying, and those that do succeed work hard at it; even those that work hard have to count on a sufficient amount of luck, but like the old proverb says, you mostly got to make your own of that stuff as well.
- It’s hard to be profound and erudite all the time (especially when we’re talking technology). It’s not hard to point to lots of other people, all of whom are probably profound and erudite about something once in a while.
- The tools we use predispose our blogging towards attempting to be profound, when really, we should probably just be pointing to others some place else.
Think about why someone would read your blog. Are you an individual of note? Do you represent an important company, orgranization, or have personal noteriety? If yes, people will read you for that reason (take Jason Calacanis, Mark Cuban, Rosie O’Donnell, etc.) If no, you have to come up with some other compelling reason for people to read your blog. One way is to be insanely brilliant (both in mind and in writing), and let’s face it, only a few people fit this bill. Another is to be a reliable source of good information. Think Dave Winer; while Dave is often profound, I think the reason his blog is so popular is because, more often than not, he’s acting as a reliable source of good information. The best bet would be to combine the two of these, and be a profound source of reliable information.
It’s really a shame we don’t have better tools to encourage more link-oriented blogging; there really are only a handful of folks out there that write in the style (actually, the only one I can think of is Dave). The MovableType/Wordpress blogging paradigm discourages one from posting short, quick links as you notice them (A title? We don’t need no stinkin’ titles). I’m still looking for a Wordpress plugin/template or something that let’s me do this gracefully (Ross has been using del.icio.us, which works, but doesn’t quite have the same effect).
* - It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of these echo-chamber, blogging-about-blogging-type threads pop up on Techmeme; in the early days, they came up quite frequently, I assumed Gabe tweaked things to devalue intra-blogosphere conversations. Maybe I’m wrong, but I was kind of enjoying it. ;)
** - Another (amusing) question to consider: if someone besides Doc Searls had been at Heathrow, would the whole thing have ever mattered?
*** - at some point I want to seriously address the issues raised by Mark Evans (which is what drew my attention to this whole discussion in the first place), which I think are very, very important, and to which I’ve given a considerable amount of thought (even before he mentioned it).