370. The future of science blogs
Save This Post as PDFI’ve just finished a reading rather interesting article by Mark Penn on WSJ called “America’s newest profession: bloggers for hire“. Penn presents rather interesting stats there (based on analysis by Technorati):
The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income.
I guess, it is well explained in comments after the post how much these estimations are actually worthy, but the very point of the post remains solid as I think: blogging is a possibility to make full-time income, albeit maybe only hundreds of people in the world are able to make it their full-time income.
What I’ve also noticed is a general tendency for smaller blogs to be submerged into larger blogs/blog portals. The reason for that becomes very clear when you compare Alexa ranks of individual blogs (say, Lubos Motl’s Reference Frame – around 217000 right now) and portals (say, Science Blogs – around 8000 right now) and take into account that rank does scale with internet traffic. In other words, if a site has more content, it will have larger traffic, and individual blogs will always loose in this respect to blog portals.
As I said, this seems to be a general tendency. What about science blogs, close to our hearts? The same thing holds here as well: during last months many individual popular blogs “went corporate” including Cosmic Variance, ArXiv Blog and Quantum Diaries Survivor.
So, the statement of the problem I would like to solve is the following: blog portals have much more traffic than individual blogs since they produce much more content (let us say, a blog portal produces 50 updates per day, while an individual blog – 2-3 posts/day at maximum). How to make the individual blog competitive with a portal? I’ll be really happy to hear your thoughts…
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I read recently (sorry, I don?t remember where), that the success of a blog doesn?t depends in the number (not even the quality) of posts.
Obvious nonimportant reasons aside (the average reader not always is going to like the smarter content)the reason seemed to be related to the ability to belong to “social network”. That doesn?t necessarily means to be in a blog portal. It is something more like “if you post comments in my blog I?ll post them in yours and I?ll link your blog so you will have more readers).
Also it is useful if in your blog there are interesting links. Specially if hey are RSS links. Think, for example, of the U-duality blog. It has RSS to arxiv last articles (I copied it) and also an RSS to most recent comments in some selected blogs (I didn’ copy it because , well, I would feel some shame if I would do so xD)
About the number of posts per day that you mention my opinion is that you wouldn?t worry too much. Too many posts daily can be contraproducent. Specially if they are serially depending some of them. In your blog you have many interesting posts that I would like to read some serialized(for example the series of turbulence) and other ones unserialized, but simply I have no time to read all the posts of your blog. That is a bad thing for your serialized posts because I can?t read (or I shouldn?t) read the last ones without reading the previous.
That is, you have, for my particular free time, far enough rhythm of publication. You mention blogs with 50 posts daily, who in hell has time to read them? And if you begin to loose too posts you can ending losing the interest in a blog.
Anyway, I guess that if you would decide to change your blog to a blogportal I believe that you will not have any problem in getting good offers
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Dear Javier,
Actually, I have pretty decent Twitter (around 800 people right now) and Facebook (about 300 friends) base. What I’ve found is that contribution from social networks does lift your traffic but not nearly as effectively as larger number of content.
The point is that you read what you like but somebody else who visits the blog will also find what she likes among those 50 daily posts
Think for example about traffic that comes from Google – if you have more indexed content, Google will send more visitors to your blog. But increasing the number of posts you do can loose some loyal readers, that’s true (an observed effect mentioned somewhere). In overall, though, the traffic will be increased because of new people visiting your site – check out top 10 technorati blogs and how many posts per day do they publish.
Right now I don’t have an intention to do so…
Cheers and thanks for dropping by,
Dmitry.