Why are you reading this blog entry?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 10:28
Yes, I’m serious. Why are you reading this blog entry? Here on the blogs, we regularly get into discussions about why people blog. Yet we don’t often seem to talk about why we read other people’s blogs. Let’s take a little time to explore this.
Some of us spend time pouring over our access logs to try and figure out how people found the website. I’ve done a little checking into around half a million access records for my site. 97.5% of them don’t have any referrer records. So, a lot of the ways people find the site just aren’t showing up. Of the records that do show up, about 1% are from Google. And about half of a percent come from BlogExplosion. MyBlogLog comes in third as a source of readily identifiable sources.
Yet this leaves all kinds of questions. Within Google, it is easy to find the search terms that bring people to the site. “Smoking Jacket” and “Drupal Themes” are the two most popular search terms bringing people to my site. Why are these so popular? I suspect some of it is because there aren’t a lot of other things written about smoking jackets and drupal themes.
BlogExplosion is a pretty straight forward click exchange. They send people to Orient Lodge based on the number of sites that I visit through BlogExplosion. Most users just come to Orient Lodge randomly according to BlogExpolsion’s selection criteria.
MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and BumpZEE are more interesting. If you came here through one of them, how did you get here? Did you click on my link on a widget on someone else’s blog? Did you start off at their front page? Did you follow links from your community or friends? Did you arrive at my MyBlogLog page some other way? If you did click on my link on a widget, what made you click on my link instead of someone else’s link?
Personally, I like to follow the links of people that visit my site through MyBlogLog. As I write this, I see that everyone who has recently visited my site via MyBlogLog is someone whose site I’ve recently visited. Yet I like to go deeper. I like to follow the links of people who have visited my site. Do you do this? If so, how do you approach it? Do you click on the most recent link on one site and then the most recent link on the next, and so on? I often approach things this way. Sometimes, I click on the least recent link, figuring I’ll come back to the site again later, and that link will have fallen off the list.
Sometimes I click on all the links from one site before going on to explore the links from the next. Other times I just wander following one link to the next. What do you do?
I do similar things with Wordless Wednesday. I like to visit the sites that have ‘Mr. Linky’ and then click on the links of other people that have visited the site. Again, there is the issue of do you follow all the links from one site, and then from a second, or do you chain them out, one after another.
Another question about who comes to the site is where they are coming from. I like ClustrMaps. It shows the distribution of where people are coming from. In the case of Orient Lodge, it seems to match population distributions, with a bias to people from the United States. All of that is about as expected, but doesn’t really tell me much.
So, why do people browse through blogs, especially through sites like BlogExplosion, MyBlogLog, or Wordless Wednesday. For me, one of the reasons is to get other people to come visit my site. However, doing it just to drive traffic isn’t particularly fulfilling and I suspect that people for whom that is a sole motivation get bored fairly quickly and move on to other ways of gaining traffic.
Instead, there are the aspects of building community. I find people talking about issues of daily life that I think people involved in politics need to be spending much more time listening to. I see images of what matters to people, their kids, their time off, flowers and rainbows. I read great stories of people trying to live through lives that have been dealt them, such as Mommy’s Busy… Take a Number, whose daughter, Faith, I asked people to pray for.
These pictures and stories build up in my mind and help shape my view of our country and our world.
So, perhaps some more qualitative research into why people visit blogs is necessary. Let’s do this informally. Add a comment, or if you find my policy of requiring a verifiable email address and not posting spam too onerous, send me an email or add a comment in my MyBlogLog messages telling me about why you visit my blog, and other blogs. Are you part of the 97.5% that I have no referrer information from? Did you come here via a search engine like Google? Did you come through BlogExplosion, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Wordless Wednesday or some other click sharing or community building site? What sort of system do you use to follow links that cascade? If you are coming through these sort of sites, why are you doing it? How much of it is to build traffic? How much of it is to participate in some sort of online community? What do you get from such communities? What else should I be asking about?
If you want to be really helpful, add your own reflections on your own blog, link back to this and let me know so I can link to your discussion as well. Maybe we can all learn a bit more about each other and why we are reading each other’s blogs.
methodius' comment
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 12:40.Methodius left a message on my MyBlogLog message board. He wrote:
For those who haven't read Methodius' blog, I encourage you to do so. He is an Orthodox Deacon from South Africa. He posts interesting content from a perspective that is close to mine, but different enough to be particularly intersting.
His comment made me think of two different things. First, I should have talked more about people finding sites via MyBlogLog using tags. Do you use tags? Which tags are important?
This raises a bigger, more important issue. One criticism on online social media is that people will tend to search out people with similar perspectives. They won't find information that challenges their thinking and we'll see people become more set in their thinking as opposed to having useful dialog. Does this happen with you? Do you do things to seek out other opinions that you can learn from? Or do you seek out other opinions to go try and change their opinions?
One final note. Methodius' message was not flagged as 'private', which is why I felt it was okay to post it here. If you contact me through email or messages, I will post them here, unless you let me know, in one way or another, that they are intended to be private.
Why am I reading this?
Submitted by BethPena on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 12:46.I read your community post on mybloglog and decided to check it out. Why do I read the blogs I do? Some blogs I read every day - they have somehow become a second family that I get and give advice too. Being in my mid-forties, there are many like-minded people out there trying to figure out how they got to this place in their life and where do we go from here. Other blogs I read sporadically-if someone joins my community, I will go check them out. If I like it - they get on my daily read - if not, they either get dumped all together or just get read once a month. The main reason I read others blogs is simple - the ability to learn about others. I had been in the corporate world for over 20 years with people who all thought, talked and did the same things - and I did not. As I ease my way out, I find that there are many others who have the same ideas of how the world could be. It gives me the strength to try and make a difference every day...
Thanks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 13:30.Beth,
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts. As I mentioned in my comment about Methodius' message, there is a concern that many people on blogs spend time trying to find others that will reinforce their own views as opposed to seeking to learn about others, the way you have so nicely described. I really like the perspective you add.
For those of you who haven't visted Beth's blog, please check out mylifestartsatfortytwo.com
Joyce Hopewell's message
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 13:42.Joyce Hopewell left a message for me over at MyBlogLog as well. Joyce writes a blog, Joyce Hopewell Astrological Chart Interpretations. I've always had mixed feelings about astrology. George W. Bush's birthday is three days before mine, and for those broad based astrological forecasts, we are both cancers and should have the same forecast. Somehow, that just doesn't work for me.
However, serious astrology goes much deeper. While Bush and I were born three days apart in terms of the regular calendar. We were also born thirteen years apart, and probably something like 600 miles apart. I sure that if you look at where Mars, Venus, the moon, and whatever else astrologers look at, were in the sky when Bush was born and when I was born, you find things completely different. I certainly hope so!
Anyway, Joyce has an interesting perspective on astrology which she refers to as Astrological Psychology.
I like anything that helps us understand more about ourselves, and I hope that is coming through in my blog post here and the discussion here.
Joyce wrote:
It does help, and I do hope there are interesting follow ups, here and perhaps on other blogs.
More MyBlogLog messages
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 17:06.reasonablerobinson from gullibility.blogspot.com wrote:
I like that.
Good question for which I have no definitive answer!
Submitted by mouseski on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 17:11.I think this might be a very good question to re-ask over on my blog sometime; perhaps as one of my "weekly" questions.
I read the blogs that are on my sidebar on a regular, if not daily, basis as those are the people that I have connected with and become friends with. Each and every one of them is special in some way.
As for other blogs that I read, I tend to connect to them through my regular blogs when I see something that I found interesting or possibly through one of the memes that I might do. I know there are a lot of really good blogs out there that I would like to read but I just don't have the time.
Oh, and I will also visit blogs that have left me comments as it always seems nice to return the favor of a visit!
Linda
Are We There Yet??
http://mouseski.blogspot.com
Why are you reading this blog entry?
Submitted by reasonable robinson on Fri, 07/13/2007 - 11:20.really interesting subject - now that 'i'm tagged' i will post something on my blog
thanks Aldon for choosing a thought provoking topic
Because there's always something interesting on Orient Lodge!
Submitted by mard on Sat, 07/14/2007 - 17:35.That's why I'm reading this blog entry, and especially, commenting on it. I like the politics here and the depth of information, and the just plain depth.
However, I'm amazed at the amount of time one could spend chasing down links. Time, it seems to me, is the big bugaboo. How on earth are we able to find the time? I have several books, actual physical books, I'm trying to read but if I devote much time to them, what happens to my blogging? Well, it goes down the tubes. That's what. The past week or so I've been trying to get back into the swing of things in my blogging, putting up a new post each day.
How did I first find Orient Lodge? One day I saw Aldon's picture on my MyBlogLog list of people, got curious, and went to this site. I would love to find time to explore these other networks. I found a link to Methodius here and find his blog very interesting indeed, even though I'm not really a Christian.