Blogging in the dark

My blogging experiment has been going on for nearly three months. In that time, I've learned a lot, almost all of it positive or useful in some way. I hope some of what I have learned while blogging will assist me in eventually landing a decent job, as it seems online skills are pretty much mandatory now, particularly in the news business.

The negatives have been few. Permitting anonymous comments was a mistake in that it allowed too many unfiltered, hit-and-run remarks at the start. However, making it a little tougher for readers to post comments by using certain restrictive blog settings has apparently killed comments entirely, even those from registered users. Trying to find a balance between being open and keeping things in good taste is something very difficult to achieve on the web.

Blogging is also time consuming. I am a bit of a news junkie, so reading takes up a fair portion of my morning. But then commenting on what I've read takes even more time -- anywhere from another 20 minutes to an hour or more depending on the length of the post. While the bulk of my day is spent searching and applying for jobs, blogging adds to amount of time my eyeballs are glued to a computer screen. Not all that healthy.

However, the biggest challenge with blogging is in getting people to visit the site and to return once in a while. Without advertising, building an audience seems nearly impossible for a general-topic blog like this. It has been a humbling experience for me because I thought I had enough interesting things to say to build at least a modest community here through word of mouth. As you can see by the numbers on this chart (above), monthly visits to the site are minimal relative to the traffic that other sites receive. And November is shaping up to show a slight decrease, which is discouraging. Even my friends rarely check out the blog, which is probably something I need to reflect on a bit more.

It seems it is much easier to get a reaction by just writing something quick and shallow on Facebook, where there is a captive audience with little time to read long posts.

Various folks have offered advice on how to create more of a buzz and interaction here. My intentions were not to get people to come here through trickery or sensationalism, but to rather focus on the issues of our time (including subject matter from my personal life) with the occasional veering off to something outside of the news. I have also touched on a lot of journalistic issues that I thought would be of some interest to those in the newspaper or media profession. This approach and these topics, however, don't seem to get the viral reaction most bloggers seek.

Hopefully, I will soon be working again and either be blogging on some company's time as part of my job duties or leave the blogging world to pursue some other endeavor. What I won't do is continue to fuel this general-topic blog without an audience or any feedback. I don't want this blog to become nothing more than an electronic a diary.

I have also decided that any future blogs will be more specific. Perhaps I will do a Washington Redskins blog or a commuter blog for Northern Virginians, where there is a natural audience already in place. Seems that unless you're a celebrity, opinionated blogs about news and one's life just don't have the right stuff to go viral, not even on a small scale.