The Lessons of Multiple Blogging

Blessed as I am with the attention span of a gerbil, I tend to pursue new interests all too often.

Blogging has turned out to be the ideal answer to this trait—or the ultimate means of self-destruction, depending on your point of view. Since launching this blog in the summer of 2003, I've created at least a couple of dozen others. Some have been short-lived; others have persisted and flourished. All have taught me something about the nature of this medium.

A common cultural element of the blogosphere is the desire for traffic; we tend to speak in hushed tones of the traffic enjoyed by Instapundit or Kos (who certainly don't need links here to swell their numbers). When I visited a Canadian right-wing columnist's blog the other day (well, okay, it was Andrew Coyne), I was impressed (and depressed) by his traffic. He posted briefly about the defection of a Conservative star MP who crossed the floor to sit with the Liberals—and who thereby saved the Liberal government in Thursday's vote on the budget. Last time I visited, his visitors had left almost a thousand comments.

Emerging Online Dialects
I was impressed because I had no idea Andrew Coyne enjoys such an audience online, and depressed because the comments revealed a degree of nastiness I didn't think we Canadians are capable of. It's not comforting to think that such spiteful people are just one vote away from taking power. Nonetheless, from a webwriter's point of view it's fascinating to read the online dialect of these folks. What might have been confined to college-dorm bull sessions or pub crawls is now a full-fledged form of online discourse.

Certainly my own political blog, The View from Seymour, enjoys no such traffic, and it's certainly not because I'm too genteel to blast my opponents in their own dialect. I post occasionally, and usually it's just a link to something I think my visitors might enjoy or find enlightening. But I admire Coyne for creating a highly interactive blog; interactivity is what this medium is all about. A blog without comments (worse yet, a blog that doesn't permit comments) isn't achieving its potential.

Education Blogging: Not the Next Big Thing
Education is my profession, and after 38 years I still love it despite all its clerical tedium. I thought blogs would be a super tool for teachers and students. Every semester for the last two years I've created a blog for each of my courses, and with few exceptions they've been a waste of time. The students find it convenient to download the handouts they missed because they slept in, but the blogs inspire nothing like the kind of discussion I'd hoped they would.

So one of my least active blogs is Prototype, originally created as a demonstration of blogging for education-technology mavens here in BC. It does, however, contain a link to one lovely example of student blogging that my Tourism degree students created about a year ago. That one project was worth all the uploaded handouts and empty Comments boxes. In On Education I can occasionally vent on some issue that excites or worries me, like the continuing decline in males' educational success.

Sometimes a blog will start out being great fun, but then fall into neglect. I enjoy reviewing books, but Recent Reading turned out to demand more time than I could afford to give it. So it's mostly a place to post links to books I've reviewed elsewhere.

Blogging is a great form of self-education, and I've started a couple for just that purpose. H5N1 is my effort to keep track of the avian-flu question, and to learn something about it in the process. Similarly I've been interested for years in the strange connection between income gaps and life expectancies in the developed countries. It's been a huge issue in the public-health field for a decade or more, and the connection has been noted for a century. But it seems never to emerge as a serious political issue. So Jou Tou and Silk Road Music is for two musician friends who do great things in world music, and Ji Won is about a young Korean woman here in Vancouver who suffered terrible harm in an attack three years ago. I've written an article about her for The Tyee that will appear at the end of this week (May 27), and of course I'll put a link to the story on Ji Won's blog.

One special-purpose blog has turned into a surprising success. Answering the questions of a colleague teaching English in China, I decided to create Ask the English Teacher. It now attracts about 250 hits a day, and it's a rare day when I don't get at least one question about English usage. This is another form of self-education, because it obliges me to dig into the origins of words and the subtleties of grammar. It's also taught me that even the strongest personal relationships can be deeply stressed by disputes over spelling and usage!

Print on Paper: True Glory?
My two core blogs are this one and Writing Fiction. "Writing for the Web" usually attracts about two-thirds the traffic of "Writing Fiction." This tells me that for all the attractions of this medium, people still dream of true glory: one's words in print on paper.

I continue to marvel that when people type "writing fiction" into Google, they get about 26 million hits...and my humble site is #1. I named the blog for the dull literal reason that writing fiction is what it's about, but this happy accident taught me something: if you do want traffic, use the phrases people would turn to in looking for information.

"Writing Fiction" is a kind of journal of a novel in progress, but it's been in, um, progress for over two years, and my slowness isn't entirely due to lack of publisher interest; the sheer amount of time taken up in blogging is a more serious hazard to people writing for print on paper. Aspiring writers could certainly procrastinate even in the pre-Web days, but now they can write about their procrastination for a world-wide audience, instead of just inflicting their laments on their significant others.

Nonetheless, I intend to keep on writing my novel, and to keep on blogging. Both forms of writing are highly self-educational, and that, ultimately, is the purpose of any writing: to learn what we've learned.

Comments

[FredOnSomething]

Great post Mr. Kilian,

Sometimes, things are incomprehensible... However, I think that the fact that Mr. Coyne is a columnist in some of the most popular journals in Canada have something to do with his traffic. However, I think he agree with you: http://andrewcoyne.com/2005/05/i-alienate-my-readers-again.php

Blogs would be a great educational tool. The problems is that it take time and patience, things that most students spend elsewhere, or simply do not have.

You said it: it's a perfect tool for self-education. I'm like you, I first started to blog to learn something. I started my blog 8 months ago to practice my English writing. At first, it was not as enjoyable as I thought but I finally found a great pleasure to build it, write it and converse with my readers. I had a goal: I used Blogs to reach it. 8 months later, I found that my English has really increased despite the fact that all my social interactions here are in French.

By the way, I just subscribed to the feed of your English usage blog, it's a great idea you had :)

Thank for this post, it was a pleasure to read it,

Salutations,

Fred

[Crawford Kilian]

Thanks for your comments, Fred, and especially for the follow-up on Andrew Coyne. He has indeed suspended his blog's comments function. Evidently he found his readers' behaviour as tiresome as I did.

I can't resist commenting, however, on something else Coyne has just published:

"A Liberal less than a week, la Stronach already has the ly - er, lingo down pat. Ms Stronach pronounces herself hurt by the reaction to her last-minute conversion to the Liberal cabinet/cause, and touches all the right bases: new low, return to civility, why the focus on her private life, etc. As her old friend and mentor Brian told her, ya dance with the one that bought ya."

The Brian in question is the former Tory prime minister, Brian Mulroney, who achieved for his party both its greatest majority and its near-total destruction. And what I hope he told Belinda Stronach was: "Ya dance with the one that bRought ya." Quite a Freudian slip!

[FredOnSomething]

Hehehehe

Canadian politic is becoming a national sport. All the things that happened 25 years ago come back in unexpected places like the commission gommery...

The most beautiful paradox in the Canadian history is that the vote for the separation of the Quebec the 20 may 1980 give the repatriation of the Canadian constitution some years later. Is that not so beautiful?

Now, the program that helped the vote of the "Non", is separating the Canada one more time.

Canadian politic is a pearl of our beautiful country ;)

Salutations,

Fred