It’s a full week since my last post. I’ve been busy, adding volunteer work with the Museum of Printing to my schedule and getting back to regular singing with the Exeter UU choir after a summer break. During that time, I’ve been thinking about what blogging (especially this blog) accomplishes and how I might reach more people.

Blogs were once a bigger part of the Internet. It’s easy to set one up, and as long as you don’t do things that will upset the hosting provider, you can say what you want. People can follow it in a variety of ways, and they don’t need to hope the software will declare it worth seeing. That’s not what people want now. They want to have everything in one place, they subscribe to much more than they can read, and they trust the website to decide which items they’ll see. Then they’ll gripe about The Algorithm, but these sites are just giving them what they want. They don’t want the responsibility of being active readers, but they don’t want a big corporation’s software making their decisions for them. What do they want?

A lot of them don’t want in-depth reading. They want a flow of input which they’ll passively absorb. People are reading less long-form material than they used to. Even a 1000-word blog post is too much for many. Still, the written word is vitally important. That’s the best place to record facts and explore ideas. Building and keeping an audience is hard, and sometimes it’s frustrating to see which posts work and which don’t. For a while, my most popular post was a piece of fluff on why the New York Times excluded some words from Wordle and not others. I eventually deleted the content.

I keep a blogroll in the sidebar to link to blogs readers might find interesting, especially if they’re by people I know. That used to be an important way to find blogs, as well as building the search rank for ones a lot of people liked. Google tweaked its search algorithm to give little weight to blogrolls, so many people gave up, but they still help people to find material they’ll like.

RSS feeds are a good way to track blogs, especially ones with irregular schedules, and many blogs have one by default, but not as many publicize their feeds. Maybe I’m just an old Neandertal longing for the old, decentralized Internet, but it had something which the big social media sites don’t have as much of: control over what you read.

I’ll keep writing and obsessing over my readership statistics. Some people will keep reading, and hopefully they’ll find something of value.