Speakout: Blogs

16 Jun 2007 in Writing

Blog On

JOHN BURNS looks at the burgeoning world-wide lure of the blog.

IT’S THE figures that scare me. One hundred million on-line blogs, with 100,000 new blogs every day. The biggest blog in the world, by Chinese actress Xu Jinglei, has had over 50 million page views. More people have looked at her pages than most best selling authors.

Surely the blog is mightier than the pen, maybe even the newspaper? With that kind of readership there has to be real power in this medium, and blogging is something that no one can ignore.

The word Blog is a corruption from the words web log, and a blog is, fundamentally, an on-line diary available for the rest of the planet to read. The majority of blogs are in written form, although they can be in many different media.

My own blog, Purple Comedy, is an audio blog, or Podcast, and we have chosen to make it closer to a radio show than most other audio blogs. There are, however, a great many audio blogs that are much closer to the format of an audio diary.

When I began listening to Podcasts I was inspired by a number of them, but one stuck in my mind in particular. It was ‘Of Rice and Zen’, written by a British teacher living in Japan, which chronicles the ups and downs of his daily life.

He speaks with an engaging and open style that generated my own interest in audio blogging. As well as written and audio blogs there are photo blogs, for example, the Black Isle’s very own ‘Sunshine over the Black Isle’ by photographer Trevor Powell is a good example of a blog packed with local interest.

Blogging, in some shape or form, is almost certainly here to stay, given the hunger human beings seem to have to communicate with each other

Many blogs are also a blend of different media, and the MySpace website is crammed with a huge variety of videos, recordings of songs, photos and sketches – in fact just about everything the weather will allow.

The big question is why do it? What makes a carpenter from Cape Cod and an unemployed musician from Birmingham have the same thought? The one that goes: “I know, I’ll go on the internet and tell the world my most intimate secrets. Everyone is bound to be interested.”

Why would they want to do that? Well, I have a theory, aside from the commercial reasons which I’ll talk about later. I think it has to do with wanting to be part of a community, perhaps wanting a sense of identity in a world that divides us into spectator and actor.

The media would have us believe that the celebrities, the super people, are the only real people – the rest of us are just drone bees here to serve them and be good little consumers.

If we all lived in villages what would be the point of Blogging, everyone would know us anyway. Also, it’s much easier than real life; you only have to look at what goes on in Internet chat rooms to see that.

You can talk to someone, flirt with them, insult them or whatever, and it’s completely safe. I have this awful vision of a world in which no one ever meets, they just chat in a virtual world.

There are, of course, less esoteric reasons to blog. If a Chinese actress can attract 50 million visitors to her site then she has enormous commercial potential. For performers it is also a very effective way of raising your profile.

A good example of this is Scottish Comedian Janey Godley with her award winning blog. Janey is now a best selling author and writes her own newspaper column in The Scotsman.

Janey is a blogging machine – you’ll find extracts from her daily life, videos of her comedy and sketches she has written and performed with her daughter. The success of her blog is no accident as she has clearly studied what goes into making a good blog.

Content is king. If your blog is informative and entertaining people will come back, if not you’ll end up talking to your self. Janey has ensured her blog is entertaining with her wit and the power of the stories she tells, but she also updates it everyday and has a mate who posts it on 150 sites each week.

All that generates Janey about 150,000 readers per week. People who will come to her shows and read her books and magazine articles.

The power of the Internet as a marketing tool is well established. Even for commercial companies, blogs can be influential as a means of getting their products talked about and bringing them to the consumer’s attention.

For example, if you manufacture secateurs then getting yourself a rose growers’ blog will do you no harm at all. Academic institutions are also discovering the importance of blogs in raising their profile for potential students and carrying out academic discussions.

For the Highlands and Islands, blogs have particular relevance. The Internet can shrink the world like no other tool on earth – distance is meaningless in cyberspace. I have subscribers and listeners from China to Australia and Mexico.

Purple Comedy can boast of being Scotland’s biggest comedy Podcast, and that was produced from my front room in Inverness with a basic computer and Broadband connection.

It could just as easily have been done from a croft on Skye or a bedroom in Thurso. Witness writer and broadcaster Tom Morton’s blog from Shetland. If you are good enough, distance is no barrier, so for writers from remote parts of the country a blog can offer a way to make an impact on the bigger picture.

But does the simple act of writing a blog offer something to the writer? I think it does. For one thing, to have a successful blog you have to make regular, if not daily postings. The challenge to sit down and write something interesting, or even funny every single, day is a considerable one given the demands the rest of our lives place on us.

It’s strange what thoughts scuttle from the corners of your mind when you sit down with nothing in particular to say. I find that bits of my blog become sketches and then come creeping into my stand up act, and visa versa.

The sheer discipline of having to write every day and trying to create something that people might actually want to read is good for any writer. Like stand up comedy your feedback can be instant and is frequently brutal. Unlike other forms of writing, a blog is always public, you are never off stage, so you need to be prepared for the many millions of folk who seem to have nothing better to do than throw bricks.

A blog also offers minority languages a good way of getting out into the world without any great expense. There are Gaelic blogs that emanate from as far apart as Alaska and Kazakhstan.

Such blogs offer a great way for those learning the language to share their problems with others, and gain from the vast expertise that they tap into. If you ask a question on a blog you are asking it to thousands, if not millions, of people, and the chances are that someone will have been there and done that, or at the very least, will know a man who has.

So what makes a good blog? I think there is no doubt that the crucial aspect is content. Unless your readers find you saying something interesting they won’t come back. You need to have something to say, say it concisely and hopefully in an entertaining way.

Even if you manage that, the path to a successful blog is long and hard. You need to become a bit of a techy to make sure your blogs get to the search engines and drive traffic to your site.

Oh, sorry, I saw your eyelids flicker then. I know this side of it is the last thing you want to hear about, but, unfortunately, in order to get your blog read by lots of folk you will have to know at least something about the technical side of the life of a blog.

So, are we just witnessing another passing fad that will fade away like the Hoopla Hoop craze that lasted a few months in my childhood, or those awful executive toys that were popular? You know, ball bearings bouncing back and forth that held your attention for about five seconds.

No, you don’t remember? Well, I suppose one has to be of a certain age. There is some evidence that blogging has plateaued out at about 100,000,000 blogs. That is that old bloggers will drop out at about the same rate that new ones drop in.

There is simply a limit to the number of folk who want to, or have the opportunity to, be interactive on the internet. However, blogging, in some shape or form, is almost certainly here to stay, given the hunger human beings seem to have to communicate with each other.

The Internet is a fluid medium and it would be a brave man who could predict the shape of cyberspace in ten or twenty years.

Love it or hate it, the Internet has changed our lives forever and until it is possible to upload our thoughts directly on to the greedy computers of a billion surfers, blogging is here to stay.