Noise

The problem with getting an engaging, responsive audience when you’re blogging for fun is the shear volume of blogs and other user generated content fighting for attention online. If we look at Technorati’s data the are currently about 112.8 million blogs online, and over 250 million items of tagged media.

Dig a bit further into this data and it’s revealed that there are over 175,000 new blogs every day with over 1.6 million posts per day (over 18 posts every second).

There is a lot of noise out there. Chances are that there are a lot people out there saying similar things to you.

Signal

The fun part of blogging is when you get feedback, it makes you feel like the effort you have put into your post has bee recognized, and generally leaves you with a nice warm feeling. It’s also nice to know that something you have done may have helped someone in some way.

To increase the likelihood of generating feedback for you work, it is important to have something concrete to speak about. Without a clear and defined topic of conversation it’s more difficult to get a response from people, especially complete strangers you have never conversed with before.

It’s for this reason that I’m very aware of what I’m talking about, and how focused I am when I write a post. I generally try to pick a topic and stick with for however long it takes me to get my feeling or opinion across (which is why some of posts are so damn long!).

Propagation

The next important thing in trying to get a conversation going is propagation, the further you spread your message the better chances are it will be heard.

I import my blog posts into facebook for example, I also often digg my posts, I tweet about them, if I use flickr I post back to my blog (and vice versa). The golden rule I adhere to is “the more places, the better”. What I mean by this is the more visibility my blog / posts get, the happier I am.

A nice side affect of this is that I will generally be propagating my link to an audience of like-minded fellows who are more likely to engage with it.

Nonchalance

Although I try to get as much interaction out of my blog as possible, the thing keeps me from getting down when I get no comments (because lets face it, we all like to get comments, especially nice ones!) is one simple thing: i don’t care.

That’s right. I don’t care. If I get no reaction to my posts, so what? The bottom line is that this blog is for me first. If along the way I help someone out with some code or inspire someone to explore creative programming then I’m happy, but it’s not the reason I do it. I write this blog for me.

So to my fellow small time bloggers I say this: Have fun, Worry Not & Keep Blogging, Keep Linking.

Work

Work is still there, still too much work, not enough staff. Interesting things may happening here soon. I’ll post more when I can. Seem to be doing a lot of guttering related websites.

In the world of freelance projects, I’ve got this nice little flash / rails project ticking over, after some delays with the first payment (reminded me why I’m no longer freelance full-time, I hate chasing money) the project is back in full swing, and I’m really enjoying it. My Ruby knowledge has really helped make this flash project one of the cleanest in terms of actionscript, lots of object-oriented goodness.

Personal

In my personal life things are nice, me and my boyfriend are going to New York City at the end of march for 11 days, I’m really excited, I’ve never been to america and of all the places in the states NYC has always seemed the most attractive to me (I’m a natural born city-dweller you see)

We have pre-ordered our PlayStation 3, we will hopefully be getting one on launch day, along with some extras (games, remote, cables extra controllers etc.) although the price tag is a little bit scary.

We finally got a proper stand for our in-you-face-fucking-huge TV (50″ plasma). ikea is fun.

Music

In no order what-so-ever I am so loving the following:

• Jamie T
• Lady Sovereign
• Death Cab For Cutie
• Cold War Kids
• The Fray

Also I have discovered that vinyl is amazing. so fuck you.

Coming Soon

Hopefully if a post a list of things I want to write I will write them. i’ll give it a go.

• the goings on at work
• new york
• vinyl

that is all.