The Blogsphere

I know very little about blogs or "successful blogging," so I'm not going to try and throw together one of those How to Blog posts. Seems like everyone tries to put their own spin on what Tony Pierce came up with a couple of years back. Even Al B Here's favorite French Teacher from Minnesota, Michèle from Voix de Michèle tried her hand at blogging advice once upon a time. The topic has been beaten to death, so I'm not going to bother wasting your time or mine trying to come up with something profound. Instead I'm going to share my thoughts on this odd little pastime of mine, blogging.

I've come to the conclusion that blogging isn't all that different from high school. Whether anyone wants to admit it, we all want to be popular. We want to express ourselves and have others think we're cool. Is Tony the best writer in the world? No. But he's got a weekly following of somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10, 000 hits per week, so he must be doing something right. I don't even approach that number, despite the constant visits by Morgan and the rest of the London crew.

If blogging is like the school cafeteria, then Tony would be sitting at the "cool" table with the jocks, cheerleaders and assorted other seniors. I'm not sure how big his network of contacts really is, but there's a mutual admiration society thing going on and with each new registration to a blog site, his audience seems to grow. He tries to maintain a quid pro quo approach to link exchanges, though I imagine that's tough to do with the volume of links he receives. That's how I ran across the blogs of both Michèle and Phil Renauld.

Glancing around the cafeteria, you'd see a table of hot girls. You know the ones. They're a little younger, usually sophomores or juniors, but you know that they'll be next in line to join the "cool" ranks. That's where you'll find Paige of C'est What?. She doesn't get near the traffic that Tony does, but she's developed a pretty loyal following of her own and has the support of Tony and Raymi. Like anything else in this world, it's connections that count when you're trying to increase blog traffic. I won't pretend that every entry is brilliant, but she's talented and keeps me entertained.

I'm not even going to try and classify Raymi. She's a phenomenon of her own. You'll either love or hate her style; there's really no middle ground. Either way, she won't care what you think. She's definitely got her own little corner of the "cool" table. There are a number of other bloggers that are somehow connected to Raymi and/or Tony and thus benefit from the sheer volume of traffic. Raymi's boyfriend, Fil, would probably get a fair amount of traffic on his own, but being hooked up with Raymi certainly doesn't hurt his exposure.

So where does Al fit into this whole dynamic? Near as I can figure, I would probably be the equivalent of the A/V team (making my current employment all the more appropriate, non?). I've been at this since late December and have been trying to find an audience beyond my own immediate circle of friends. So like many of us out there, I've turned to sites like BlogExplosion and Blogmad to increase my exposure. This is pretty much telemarketing for blogs. Users surf these sites and earn credits based on the number of sites they visit. These credits are then translated into visits from other users of the site. All you can do is hope that people stay longer than the requisite 30 seconds or so and that an audience develops. Not particularly effective, by any means, but I've run across blogs like Underneath the Mask so I suppose that makes it worth the mind numbing hours spent channel surfing the blogs. I have no idea if I've grown my audience at all through either of these sites, so feel free to leave a comment to introduce yourself if you've come though either of these sites. Chances are good that I'll link to your site.

Anyway, that's all for now. Til next time...