Reply: Blog Feedback OR How I learnt to stop Blogging and start Thinking

Now that I think about it, posting an entry with feedback, without actually adding my comments to it was kind of lazy. I thought it best to add another post with my thoughts rather than just respond with a comment.

First of all, I must confess that this is not the kind of blogging style that I am comfortable with, and hence my comments are coloured by my personal discomfort. It is possible that for the target audiences that your blog is aimed at, the points that I raise are not applicable.

I have thought a little about what my target audience should be, and the only answer I seem to have is: everyone. Searching is something that all Internet users do at some point of time, and the idea is that this blog should ideally go into the different aspects of search, some technical and others not so technical, but all relevant. So your points are definitely applicable and much appreciated.

* Your blog posts don't clearly define, or explain, much of the new terms and jargon they introduce. Rather, they coolly and unceremoniously point to links. Moreover, it often happens that visiting the link pointed at only serves to confuse rather than clarify because it goes to a very general page.

The high linkedness of your page is to be appreciated (and it's probably one of the desirable features in modern blogging) but I am always more contented with a blog post that makes complete sense even without a person bothering to follow any of the links. Of course, this may further depend on the background of the person. For instance, a person who is anyway up-to-date on the latest products and services offered by Google and Microsoft may not have to follow many of the links. Depending on the kind of audience you are aiming at, I think you should seek to make the blog post self-contained for that audience (or at least, the person's understanding of one sentence should not depend on having gone to a link in an earlier sentence).

I think the problem here is that when you read about something day in and day our ( as I am forced to do about search ), you tend to assume that people know about certain things that you repeatedly read about. I will work on getting around this

About links, very often I link to blogs, which have different opinions, and to pages that go into extreme details that I can not possibly afford to go into. To me this is just a way to show where I am getting my facts from and what has led me to say certain things that I do say. In other words, I guess this blog is an attempt to talk about my understanding and views about certain things, and I think it only fair to link to alternative views. However if, content-wise, blog entries are incomplete, that is something I will have to work on.

* Your blog posts are too short. Again, a matter of personal taste. I prefer longer blog posts. Some of my own get too verbose, of course. What I'm really talking about in length is not the number of words but the internal structure: an introductory gambit that introduces the ideas to be discussed, a main body where several ideas are
discussed, and then some conclusions (for longer ones, many iterations between ideas and conclusions). A few twists in between. If you're aiming at a "news blog" I think this one does the trick reasonably well. But I think that as a "trend analysis" blog this doesn't quite meet up to the mark. You seem largely keen to state some words, drop some names, point to some sources, make some grand statements and quit with a "wait-n-watch".

Frankly I am not aiming at a news blog. That would just be redundant, I think there are enough news sources across the net. Also I want to avoid the repetition of things that a whole lot of people have said already. When talking about a product, I could of course go into the details of what that product is - but then again, every new product results in thousands of such blog posts, what then is the point of yet another "summery of About Pages blog"? I think the idea is that a user is introduced to a product or a concept, pointed to places where he or she can get details of that product ( if they don't know about it ) and to then exposed to what I think about it.

* I think you should completely avoid hyperlinks in your conclusion, and you should specially avoid conclusions like "I don't know ..." specially if you blog post started out with "We shall determine whether ..."

Some posts are observations regarding trends - such posts can not end but on a "lets see" note. I don't think there will be too many instances wherein a blog post tries to determine anything. I guess I just have to be more careful with my wording.

* Avoid saying things like "anyone who has..." or "it is obvious that..." I know I do that sometimes too but that's my bad habit :)

Will do...

* A question: what kind of comments do you really seek? Do you hope that people will follow all the links, read all the articles/go through the websites, and get back with comments? For the kind of posts that you have written, the comments you get will largely be meaningless because the general class of people who try to comment sensibly will first try to follow all the links so they'll be exhausted by the time they return.

Again, one of the reasons I provide so many links is that when reading blogs I often come across things I have not previously heard of. Even if the rest of the blog post does not directly depend on that concept/product, I often like to have links that I can just open in another tab for later reading. So no, I do not expect one to follow all the links before commenting. The links are like, "I think A sucks, A was started by this guy called B and if you want to read about B here is a link", or "A is a product that allows you to do this and I think this product is <rest of the blog post>, if you want to know how to use the product here is a link that might help you out".