Saturday, December 09, 2006

Open letter to the small blogger

It annoys the hell out of me to see some big names promoting themselves shamelessly [not those on my blogroll], getting major traffic and they’re truly neither quality nor well laid out. Of course, they say people visit for the expertise, to read the pearls of wisdom but this seems a very MSM thing to say. Why are they emulating the MSM? Is that what they’re trying to get into?

Then you get some fine blogs where the guys [and gals] think out what they say, they’re also clearly knowledgeable in their field, they present well and more importantly, they invite debate rather than say: “Hey look, I’m the expert – here’s your daily dose.” What happens to them? Either they get invited onto Doughty and they’re never the same again or they’re invited onto Doughty and they stay the same unaffected scribes they always were or else they gradually die away.

I call for us to set up some sort of cooperative for the smaller blogs, some sort of struggling blogger solidarity group and we can draft a few rules. We need to:

1] adopt the motto: ‘do unto other blogs as you would have them do unto you’;
2] be broadminded and accept that others in the scheme are going to have views opposed to ours. So what?;
3] include at least ten posts in a week, no matter how small;
4] actively try to get round to each blogger on our own roll at least once in two days and comment at least three times in the week;
5] promote our blogfriends with either banners, buttons or the occasional link;
6] join in their little promo things e.g. normpoll, tomlist, voluntary-code-free-zone, chicken yoghurt’s book and so on;
7] comment on other’s comments on your own blog whenever you can;
8] link – if it’s in your power to blogroll someone who’s blogrolled you, try to do it. If you can link to a member in a post, do it.

If we, the little people, all do this, with even 100 participants, we guarantee ourselves at least basic traffic, we can share ideas and improve our blogs. To this end, I’ve prepared an initial 150x95 banner above, which needs to be cut, pasted then uploaded on your sidebar. It links to an administrative blog where we’ll keep the data, manifesto and ideas sharing. If we want to change the location or go to wordpress or whatever, we just change the banner embedding.

On this blog, we can throw around ideas on how to run this thing better. For now, a start would be just to upload the banner to our sites.

22 comments:

Bill Haydon said...

uh, James...do you have an html for that thing or does one just copy and paste it?

Bill Haydon said...

Sorry. Not reading carefully. Just read post properly so I know what to do now.

Anonymous said...

I have uploaded the banner. Good idea, I'm all in favour.

Jeremy Jacobs said...

Sorted

James Higham said...

Merci beaucoup.

Anonymous said...

Good idea. I have added the banner to my site.

B^)

ThunderDragon said...

Added! An excellent idea indeed!

Anonymous said...

I'm in.

James Higham said...

There are some very hefty people on this list now. We have to get this site opened up and soon [see post above]. All advice how to do that appreciated. Do I just go into "Members" and copy down the e-mails? What if a blogger on the list doesn't have an e-mail? Help!

Daily Referendum said...

Please count me in

William Lovett said...

Add me, add me! Sounds like a good idea... I'll link to all the blogs on here, and stick the logo on my blog.

Andrew Allison said...

I am feeling rather stupid at the moment, but how do I copy and paste and upload on my sidebar?

Daily Referendum said...

Hello Andrew,

See this post:

http://nourishingobscurity.blogspot.com/2006/12/blogpower-how-to-upload-banner.html

Regards
Steve

James Higham said...

Better still, it's been streamlined now. Look at the sidebar, lds and lasses and it explains all.

Anonymous said...

Hi James, I've uploaded the banner to my site, www.morag.wordpress.com

Thank you, great idea.

Anonymous said...

Seems like a good idea, I'll try and add the code to my blog.

Anonymous said...

I like this idea. I don't know if I can commit to 10 posts a week but I'll give it a go.

James Higham said...

Your sites ahve been sent to Ian to blogroll you. any problems, contact the appropriate guy [see sidebar].

Anonymous said...

Have been sent here by Not Saussure
http://notsaussure.wordpress.com/

Am going to give it a try.

Bag said...

Sadly one month later fallen over at point 2. Hope it works out. It's a good idea and worthy of support. Let those who want a constitution excluding point 2 set up their own blogroll.

Ruthie said...

I have.... two more silly questions.

What is MSM, and what is Doughty?

That's all.

James Higham said...

Ruthie, MSM is main stream media and Doughty is a scheme devised by blogger Iain Dale which bypasses the media and lets us have our own news service. It's in my sidebar.