Attention Whoring
As I've said before, I'm probably going to get my own Web domain soon. Knowing me, "soon" might well mean in a year or so, but it's definitely in the works. If I manage to get that set up, I'll have one more venue for posting stuff, and I'm wondering how you readers would prefer to see my updates. Also, I was thinking today about how I'll often post links to my LJ posts in other places, like Facebook and Tumblr. Does anyone actually follow the links from these other sites, or am I just wasting my time in doing so? Not that it takes much time, mind you; I guess I'm more concerned about wasting YOUR time with links you have no intention of investigating. I'll generally only post an LJ update to Twitter if I think it will be of particular interest to one or more people that I know read that. I guess I see my LJ as currently being my main writing repository, with the other social networking sites being secondary. But is that necessarily true? I'm pretty sure there are people who read my Twitter updates but not my LJ posts. And Tumblr is another kettle of fish entirely, as I'm more likely to add people there when I don't know them at all, as long as I like the pictures they're posting. If you're reading my LJ, you can see everything I put on Twitter, but I've seen some people say that they purposely avoid tweet-collecting posts. I've considered removing my replies from those posts, as they often make no sense out of context, but as nobody said anything when I suggested it, I didn't bother.
I'm also interested in attracting more traffic to what I write, but I'm not sure there are really too many people interested in it. After all, most of the information I include is readily available online, so the main thing you'd get out of reading my posts is my own spin on various subjects. And is that really something that people who have no idea who I am want to see? Maybe I'm underestimating myself, though. It does seem like most of the blogs I read that get high traffic and large amounts of comments are topic-specific. Still, there are some personal blogs I follow that seem to attract more comments from people who stumbled across the page than my LJ (and perhaps anyone's LJ) does. So what is it that makes a blog more successful? Is it content? Format? Writing style? How it's indexed on search engines? Maybe it's a combination of those things, but I don't really know.
Anyway, here's a poll you can answer:
Poll Feedback
I'm also interested in attracting more traffic to what I write, but I'm not sure there are really too many people interested in it. After all, most of the information I include is readily available online, so the main thing you'd get out of reading my posts is my own spin on various subjects. And is that really something that people who have no idea who I am want to see? Maybe I'm underestimating myself, though. It does seem like most of the blogs I read that get high traffic and large amounts of comments are topic-specific. Still, there are some personal blogs I follow that seem to attract more comments from people who stumbled across the page than my LJ (and perhaps anyone's LJ) does. So what is it that makes a blog more successful? Is it content? Format? Writing style? How it's indexed on search engines? Maybe it's a combination of those things, but I don't really know.
Anyway, here's a poll you can answer:
Poll Feedback