Results tagged “blogs” from Tyler Suchman

A fantastic extended essay from Atlantic blogger-columnist Andrew Sullivan on the history, construct and psychology of blogging.  It's not written from afar but rather from the epicenter, as Andrew has been blogging before it was called that since 2000.

As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did. 

Anyone who has blogged his thoughts for an extended time will recognize this world. We bloggers have scant opportunity to collect our thoughts, to wait until events have settled and a clear pattern emerges. We blog now—as news reaches us, as facts emerge. This is partly true for all journalism, which is, as its etymology suggests, daily writing, always subject to subsequent revision. And a good columnist will adjust position and judgment and even political loyalty over time, depending on events. But a blog is not so much daily writing as hourly writing. And with that level of timeliness, the provisionality of every word is even more pressing—and the risk of error or the thrill of prescience that much greater.

A comment on The Ojai Post asked about Technorati.

Technorati is a blog and media aggregator.  In other words, they are a central location for finding content, viewing trends and just keeping an eye on what people are blogging, vlogging and talking about.  One might also classify them as a Social Bookmarking service.

Over at The Ojai Post, if you have a Technorati account set up, you can click the "Bookmark" image at the bottom of any entry on the home page, and then click the Technorati link in the list of Social Bookmarking services to bookmark that particular entry in your Technorati account.  The more people do that for an entry, the more visibility it has.  The Technorati homepage aggregates news stories, blog posts and photos by attention, meaning that as web users use Technorati to bookmark stories of interest that they find around the web, it creates more visibility for that story to casual news and blog viewers.

An important way for bloggers to create visibility in the first place is to make sure that one's blog is properly registered with the multitude of blog directories out there.  Many of them will visit, or ping, the website on a regular basis, or monitor the site's RSS feed, and automatically update new content into their directory.

Following are a couple of lists, for any blogger that wants to register their blog in as many places as possible.
Top Rank: RSS - Blog Directories
Search Engine Journal - 20 Essential Blog Directories

After running the one-person show OjaiBlog.com for a while, I started up The Ojai Post as a community experiment, looking to bring together a wide variety of voices from all corners of the Ojai community.  In the last twenty-two months, we have expanded from just a few authors to thirty, and this evening celebrated post #1000. 

The Ojai Post by the numbers:
22 - Months in existence
30 - Authors
2,000 - Percentage increase in traffic since month 1
8,000 - Population of the City of Ojai
16,961 - Current Average Weekly Circulation
804,727 - Total Daily Visitors
1,531,003 - Total Page Views