Why I Don't Blog - or Do I?

July 24, 2005

Blogging was the hot verb of 2004, so they say. I tried it, just to see what all the fuss was about, but decided that I don't have time to maintain and drive traffic to two different sites, so I moved everything in the blog to a new food section on this site (which has since grown).

"What's the difference?" you may be wondering. A blog (or weblog) is basically a fast and easy way to publish text, photos, and video on a website, without investing in site-building software or know-how. You just fill in a form on a web page, add photos (if you like), press a button, and a new entry is published on your blog site. The basic blog is structured like an online diary, with entries posted in reverse chronological order.

My gripe with blogs is that they aren't very navigable. Chronological order is all you get, and once you've filled your "most recent entries" list, it becomes burdensome for the reader to find something you wrote earlier. If your life or whatever you're writing about is so fascinating that everyone will want to read it every day, more power to you, but that's not true for most of us. The diary format is inappropriate for a site like mine, which covers a wide range of topics, few of them time-constrained.

I did set up the videoblog (vlog) section of my site in chronological order, but there are videos scattered elsewhere on the site as well, and sometimes it's a struggle to decide where to place a particular video.

Two key elements of blogs, so the blog purists claim, are trackback and comments. Trackback is an easy way for people who link to a specific article in your blog to let you know that they have done so. It's nice to know who thinks well (or ill) enough of something you wrote to reference it somewhere; it's also one of the ways that blog popularity is measured by search engines - the more people link to you, the more you're considered an authority on the topic.

Comments allow readers to add their two cents' worth right there on your blog page. Many bloggers claim to be interested in starting a dialogue, and comments can accomplish that. But comments can also become riddled with spam ("comment spam"), unless the blogger does a lot of maintenance to keep things cleaned up. One way to slow or stem the tide is to require would-be commenters to register with your blogging host and sign in before they can post a comment. However, this can be a deterrent to legitimate would-be commenters; we all have too many logins already.

Rudimentary forms of both trackback and comments can be managed on a simple website like my own. Some people have been kind enough to inform me when they linked to my site. (Some even thought they had to ask my permission, which is very polite, but hardly necessary - if you want to link to my site, for whatever reason, there's nothing I could do to stop you, nor would I want to.) Plus the search engines can tell me who links to me (see the bottom of my Search page, if you're curious; I have been surprised and amused by some of the links in to my site).

As some of you have already discovered for yourselves, I have added comments and trackback to my recent vlog posts, using a service (Haloscan) recommended by Jay Dedman (founder of the very active videoblogging group on Yahoo). It is kinda cool to get comments; the video I did about my dad in Vietnam is itself a comment on another vlog.

Jan 2006 - Haloscan is no longer displaying my comments, and I don't have time to figure out why, so I've deleted it from the site.

Okay, So Now I Do

Mar 12, 2006

Bloggers (and vloggers) insist that "it's all about the conversation" - that is, comments on a blog are just as important as the original content produced by the blogger.

Hmm. Well, okay, I can try that. The problem is that my website is a website, not set up for comments, trackbacks, and all that bloggy jazz. However, my new hosting service (Dreamhost) offers a free and easy install of blog software (WordPress).

So, as an experiment, I have installed a blog, to be used exclusively for visitor comments on the site. Whenever I post a new article, I'll include a comments link at the bottom, which will take you to a page where you can write your comments for the world to see. The first one thus treated is a piece of fluff I recently revised and expanded, on Unusual Italian Baby Names.

So, if you have any unusual Italian baby names to add to the collection, go here and have at it!

NB: That page is actually one of the most popular on my site, I guess because (English-speaking) parents are looking for inspiration for names for their kids. Who knows, "your" name could end up on thousands of kids!