Earnest – a serious and intent mental state.
– Merriam-Webster

I’ve noticed a trend lately when reading my feeds.  There are so many bloggers churning out earnest posts about supposedly earnest products and events that the fun quotient in the blogosphere is really taking a hit.  My feeds look like hundreds of little sleep-inducing Wall Street Journals.

It’s boring.  And ironic.  Ironic, because so many people are spending a ton of time and effort to mimic the very thing they claim to be in the process of replacing.  Infinite potential manifesting itself in the digital equivalent of the neighborhood newspapers we did as kids.

Blogging should be so much more than that.  Why should we albatross this new, improved and dynamic medium by using it in such a provincial manner?  How many “me too” posts do people really need to read about the latest Web 2.0 application?  One might be too many.  Hundreds are far too many.  It’s imitation to the point of irrelevancy.

Many, if not most, bloggers have the potential to be so much more than that.  To be more interesting.  To have more fun.  But fun makes the earnest blogger uncomfortable.  This is serious stuff for him, and he believes that serious and fun just aren’t compatible.  It saddens me to see all this brainpower, potential and effort directed at something so…indistinguishable.

And it doesn’t work.

No moat can contain attention.  It flies across the blogosphere at the speed of broadband.  Clicking here and yon with abandon.  And abandonment- of things too common, or too uninteresting.  Or too earnest.

The toll of earnest writing is heavy.  It’s hard to be serious all the time, particularly when you’re not being paid a decent wage to act that way.  After a while, you just give up, the way we did with our little neighborhood newspapers.  The way so many do with their blogs.

The remedy for this is a healthy dose of fun.  And the realization that fun only has three letters.  Fortunes are made on fun every day.  In fact, when you cut through the jargon, most of the stuff bloggers are concerned with are based on fun.  No one ever confused YouTube with Masterpiece Theatre.

If you want to create a new journalism, you can’t do it in the staid image of the old one.

You have to live outside the box.  Let you hair down.  Write something fun or funny.  Let it all hang out.

Otherwise, you’re just another boring newspaper nobody wants to read.  Fun beats smart every time, and in every way.

In my Darren Rowse post the other day I asked what people would do if they had $1,000 to promote their blogs.  I have been thinking about budgeting a little money to promote Newsome.Org to potential new readers.

TDavid responded with a fantastic and detailed post, full of ideas for anyone looking to spend a little money for more traffic.  It is a must read for anyone trying to build a blog.  Even if you don’t plan to spend money promoting your blog, it’s still a must read, as he includes a number of cost-free promotion ideas.

As TDavid points out, I went on a non-scheduled, unannounced blogging hiatus for several months.  I didn’t intend to.  I just got burned out and one week turned into two, etc.  I went through the same sort of thing Scoble talked about the other day.  A confluence of real world responsibilities and what often seems like a low rate of return on the hard work of blogging put me out of the blogging business for a while.  When I started back (also unplanned), I had lost some of my audience and my Technorati ranking was in free fall.

The point is that blogging is a marathon, not a sprint, for most of us.  This is particularly true when you are geographically remote and unable to plug into a local blogging culture.  Steve Gillmor, who I have met in the real world and consider a pal, tells me geography doesn’t matter in the blogosphere.  I respectfully disagree.  It’s not something you can’t overcome, but I believe if I lived in the Bay Area, I’d become friends with a lot of the guys out there, who would in turn include me in more of their online conversations.

But, like a lot of us, I don’t live out there.  So I have to find another way to promote my blog.  TDavid has some great ideas, many based on his personal history of successfully growing both a blog and other web sites.

TDavid says you need at least 75 posts a month to be in growth mode.  Historically, I would have disagreed with that, but I come from an old media perspective, having written for newspapers and trade journals for years (where a coveted monthly column became burdensome to the point of impossibility).  But having been involved in the blogosphere for a few years, I think he’s probably right.  If not for the content itself, for the content and the embedded links to draw other writers to your site, and to seed the reciprocal links which are, for better or worse, one of the established measuring sticks for blog readership.

TDavid gives some stats that support his more posts the better theory.

Then he proposes an allocation of my $1,000.

He breaks it down into 4 areas: design, widgets, contests and advertising.  Go read his post for details.  Now for my thoughts about each.

Design:  I think I should spend a little money on design, and perhaps a better search approach.  I used to use an internal Perl search engine at Newsome.Org, but I switched to Google a couple of years ago.  I think the first thing I need to do is figure out how to move my content to a WordPress platform- as there are a lot of design possibilities in WordPress that don’t exist via Blogger (my site is locally hosted, but I use Blogger (via Live Writer) to publish content).  Eric Scalf kindly wrote a WordPress template of my basic design for me last year, but I didn’t make the switch because of the frustrating URL problem.

If you are a new blogger, start with WordPress, because it’s sometimes hard to switch once you have a large archive.

Widgets: I have experimented with a number of widgets, and have a few on the site now, including my poor excuse for a tag cloud in which “nbsp,” html for a space, is the most popular “tag.”  You’ve got to love that.  Again, I think I could solve a lot of this if I could switch to WordPress.  Some widgets have a material adverse effect on page load times, so you have to be thoughtful about which ones to add.  After ignoring it for a long time, I have become a fan of the MyBlogLog widget, and find a lot of new blogs via the people who visit Newsome.Org.  I also like the Flickr widget, but it drives very little traffic to my Flickr photos.  I’m still using the GoodBlogs widget, but it’s currently under review, simply because I don’t know how much inbound traffic it generates.  I use the Twitter widget mainly to encourage readers to add me to their Twitter lists.

Steven Streight has a good summary of some available Widgets.

Contests: This is one area that I’ve been thinking about for some time.  I will definitely have a contest or two in the near future.  It seems like a good way to reward current readers and hopefully attract some new ones.

Advertising:  I have also thought about doing some advertising.  TDavid suggests Google Adwords.  I may give it a try, but I have no idea how much bang for your buck you’d get from say, a $250 purchase.  I like his idea about doing a post on the experience to get some added value.

TDavid then provides some effective, cost-free ways to promote your blog.

I used to do trackbacks a lot more than I do now.  I need to start doing them more, because they worked.  I think commenting on other blogs is also a way to get in front of potential new readers.  TDavid has several more good ideas.

This I know: no one is going to read your blog just because you write it.  And the be a good soldier, write hard and wait to be discovered technique is too remote to be a good bet.  We all have to do something to attract readers.

What do you do to promote your blog?

I’ll add links to any posts addressing this topic here, so others can read them too.

Some folks are revisiting the Twitter vs Blogging thing tonight.

Fred Wilson says we are in the era of conversation.  That saying blogging is journalism and Twitter is not misses the point.  He says we will get our news from blogs and Twitter in the future.  I think that’s true to a point, but not for the reasons Fred talks about.

Tony Hung says that Blogging and Twitter are both journalism.  Part of this is semantics, but I don’t agree.  Not unless graffiti is journalism.

As I have said before, blogs and Twitter and bathroom walls are platforms for the distribution of content.  They are not a new species of content.  The gathering and accurate reporting of news is the lynchpin of journalism, not the medium in which that news is delivered.  There are blogs and print media and maybe even bathroom walls that are journalism.  And there are ones that aren’t.

So I don’t think blogs and Twitter and all those butt-ugly MySpace pages are going to magically turn into a distributed, global Wikipedia maintained and fact-checked by our collective online consciousness.  The platforms don’t make the content any more than the bottle makes the wine.

Rather, I think blogs and Twitter are the new water coolers.  The places around which we share all sorts of information.  News, gossip, humor, photos, videos and music.  The bloggers who are fair, accurate and accountable will get more mindshare, just like the best story tellers get more ears at the water cooler.

There will be journalism.

Over time, more and more journalists will move to a blogging platform.  The main obstacle to that migration being the difficulty in taking the subscription (as in pay to read) model along with them.  As this inevitable migration happens, people will claim that blogging is reinventing journalism.

That’s not true.  It’s the journalism, or more accurately the journalists, that will reinvent blogging.

And you need not have a fedora and a old school press pass to apply.