March 4, 2009
Posted by Sam Jackson
What Makes a Good Blog? (And how I aspire to get back to writing one)
43 Folders is one of my favorite "productivity" sites on the web - unlike many of the others, it's somewhere I can go and know that I can actually learn something about how to use my time / life / neurons more efficiently and more happily. I was reading the other week a post by Merlin Mann from some time ago titled "What Makes a Good Blog?" outlining some of the key principles he saw as key to having a blog really be worth reading.
He went into more depth with his list, but I will reprise the titled bullets here. He says good blogs should have 1. a voice 2. focused obsessions 3. attention * interest 4. paragraphs 5. style and curation 6. weirdness 7. the ability to make you want to start your own blog 8. trying-ness 9. rule-breaking . My efforts to condense his paragraphs into single nouns doesn't work perfectly, but I think the idea is clear. My own blog fails at the current moment on a great many of these counts, and in some respects perhaps never lived up to all of them. While I think there are definitely exceptions to the rules here, I think that his are good guidelines to think about, fine criteria for blog judging.
What does this mean for me and my blog? Aside from the fact that I am committing that fatal sin right now, by blogging about blogging (!), my personal authorship creates a problem for the blog because while I give it a voice, today I have trouble executing focused obsession about college admissions and higher education marketing. Is this something that I am still passionate about? Yes, absolutely. But more importantly, it is not a niche that I want to focus on exclusively forever -- I don't want to be stuck in a rut, and I feel that in many ways the higher education blogosphere is not moving in any exciting directions. The integration of technology and education, and technology and marketing, is never-ending; yet somehow the same topics feel stale, perhaps because they come up again, and again, and again. So, this has been a serious de-motivation in blogging; a vicious cycle which produces less content, which leads to less interaction, which leads to less content-creation, and brings us to the level of stagnation you see here today.
So, I'm not trying enough, and I'm finding myself wanting to focus on other obsessions -- if I had any that I wanted to focus on strictly enough. What I'd like is a platform where I could post my thoughts about a related series of subjects and get a good interaction with the online community going - but the problem I have today is that too many of my blog-readers are now (or have always been) less interested in that and more interested in "finding the angles" -- either "how to get into yale" or "how to market to kids who want to get into yale" -- less about talking about the issues, less even about Q&A! Is it my own fault that I have generated so many lurkers? Come out of the dark, readers!
This post is a little unfocused because I'm quite sick, but I wanted to try to write about it and have people share their thoughts about what they would like to see from the blog. Contrary to popular belief, I don't write it so much for my own personal satisfaction so as to help others and to instigate discussions, so what others think after reading does have a big impact! Please let me know.
I'm currently a rising senior at Yale University and I've been blogging about college admissions and higher education marketing trends since I began my college application process in 2005. I now also write about my experience here at Yale.
4 Comments
March 10, 2009
Asking what makes a good blog is like what makes a good writer or paper. However, this was a refreshing blog post to read in the since that people who blog have to stop and think if they are going in the direction that was originally planned. I like the interaction through e-mail, blog comments, instant message, and other ways because it is something that I find fascinating! Talking to other people instantly across the country is amazing; especially if they are from other countries giving a life account.
March 11, 2009
Hey Sam it's been a while, hope all is well. Feel better.
I wondered what happened to you -- my feed reader just was set up wrong so I wasn't getting any of your posts.
I remember asking you a similar question when I started blogging.
Marketing is an issue that never gets old. I went to my first alumni conference last year (it made me feel quite old, actually) and they had a whole panel devoted to how marketing effects publishing (down to the "Yale font"). It was almost scary how much thought the university puts into that sort of thing.
March 19, 2009
Hi Sam! Honestly, I've always enjoyed your blog simply because you've always written from your own place in the college world, whether you were on your way to college or actually in college. The education blogosphere is full if adults yammering on and on about high school and college (I include myself in that), but it's much more difficult to find an intelligently written blog about the topics related to (and experienced by) students. Your exact subject matter doesn't matter as much to me as does being able to read about the issues you're pondering. Take care,
Alexa
March 25, 2009
Hey guys - thanks for your very heartwarming responses, it does do my blogging soul good to hear that and to see that [at least 3] people are reading.
for an example of my problems with the current higher-ed sphere, consider this analogue w/ twitter: http://tsi.classy.dk/ at this moment, 33% of the top 100 tweets on twitter are about twitter. etc.
self-reflection is good and important; rumination, on the other hand, is dangerous.
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