I sometimes play the game of attempting to guess which blog posts will capture the imagination and result in a string of responses, and which will be dead ducks.
I think I must put it down to the originality and the sheer cussedness of the community who tend to respond to Nature Network blog posts, that I’m almost always wrong.
How could you resist the temptation of the animal/human hybrid that is the Nigerian cat-woman?
Why is it that you too don’t find the origins of strange names used in science fiction fascinating?
We may never know. But it’s just possible that this blatant attempt to get them attention will succeed.
Here’s how to stun the entire blogosphere ;-)
Very funny, Sabine ;-)
Brian, you need to tell us which are your two blog posts that have generated the most comments. Then we would see the true extent of our sheer cussedness.
Anything by Dr Rohn, essentially.
Here’s how to stun the entire blogosphere ;-)
And the (presumably intended to be fictitious) blogger referenced in that story works in science
Of course!
You should have asked for gardening advice – that’s how I got my record comment number. My tomatoes are looking quite healthy now actually.
One of the joys of the web is the unpredictability of responses. To me, it always seems that there’s an inverse relationship between how pleased I am with a post and how many people read it/respond to it. Same goes for Flickr: my favourite images of all time invariably receive no views or comments.
Of course, it’s easy to get more responses through being deliberately controversial, pandering to popular opinion and so on.
Indeed.
Nah, here’s how to stun the entire blogosphere.
My tomatoes are looking quite healthy now actually.
Glad to hear it, Cath! Might I now exhale?
Henry – I’m puzzled. Why do you have to wait to exhale? Surely, exhaling will make Cath’s tomatoes even healthier (were you in the vicinity). Like the Prince of Wales talking to his plants, without the tedious words.
Why do you have to wait to exhale?
Because after Cath’s experiences with her veg, and the plethora of advice she’d been offered, I was holding my breath!
Henry, if I’d known you were holding your breath, I’d have posted an update sooner! The plants are all significantly less floppy, and 3 out of 4 have flowers starting to open.
The plants are all significantly less floppy, and 3 out of 4 have flowers starting to open.
That’s great news, Cath [gasp, pant, splutter].
I’m still waiting for Brian to reveal his two posts that have generated the most comments. Call me a pednant.
Glad to read about the tomatoes, though.
pednant! d’oh!
Oh, I don’t know. Pednant sounds rather good. I wonder what it means?
Isn’t Pednant a small coastal village in Gwent?
Okay, Maxine, my two master provokers:
No 1 – Daring to attack the sacred Rowling: Sorry, JK, you’re wrong
No 2 – Do names reflect your capabilities? – A rose by any other name
I’ve googled™ ‘pednant’ and find that it’s a popular mis-spelling for ‘pendant’. Sadly, picturesque bible-black villages in Gwent next the slow, black, sloe-black, fishing-boat-bobbing sea — didn’t feature.
Oh yes, the Prince Hal thread. I remember that, it was fun.
J K Rowling, now..that’s another matter ;-)
(BTW, have you noticed that she’s writing a two-page prequel to Harry Potter, which will be sold for charity, as part of some more general reading/book promotion exercise later this year? At least I still keep my £5 and my shirt, as it is a prequel not a sequel.)
Besides comments, another measure of blog post success would be the number of times your blog post is cited in other blogs. One way to loop up that information is through Technorati. Anna seems to be doing pretty good here as judged by her technorati authority (what a word), but that newcomer Charles Darwin is close behind.
I agree, Martin, but just playing devil’s advocate here, and perhaps this is more one for the citation in science group, what if
all the comments and technorati links are saying your post is wrong?
Naturally this is far from applying to Anna, Charles Darwin or any other Network bloggers. But certainly in the blogosphere at large, many blogs are basically insult factories tracking back or commenting fights and arguments.
Maxine, you are of course right that the number of comments and blog citations doesn’t translate into quality. But is a start to see which blogs or blog posts are successful.
The number of blog subscribers would be another interesting measure. Feedburner is the typical tool for that. Google Reader shows the number of Google Reader subscribers to any blog.
Yes, I read blogs, tables of contents, and other material via Google Reader, I like it- – it has a very nice metrics page. Recently, they have introduced a “share with your friends” feature where you can share your recommended items with friends, which I like. Although you both have to be on gmail to do this. At the moment, I share items in this way with only one friend, which works well, but I’m not sure how it would work if you had more. I believe that FriendFeed does this kind of thing more efficiently, but I’ve only just signed up to that.
Well, after some years of blogging, here’s some really profound observations. Generally, is a post to long, people don’t comment that much because it takes time to read it, and some indeed seem to think they have to read it. Topics that always fly are: Sex, Drugs, Politics, Religion, and Personal Insults. Ideally, a combination of all of the above.
If that’s not quite your style, also especially attractive are questions that have been unanswered for some thousand years, because everybody thinks he has an answer and needs to enlighten everybody else. For example, What is reality? Is time an illusion? What means ‘natural’? And so on. A recent example with currently 195 comments here. (That was not quite the intention of that posting, but anyway.)
Topics that always fly are: Sex, Drugs, Politics, Religion, and Personal Insults. Ideally, a combination of all of the above.
A prize was offered to the student who could write the most succinct essay on sex, religion and mystery. The winning entry went like this:
My God, I’m pregnant. I wonder who did it?
Since this post I’ve been experimenting with blogging frequency and it does seem as if blogging too often can result in lower commenting rate.
I think it’s down to a failing in the way Nature Network is set up. Your main view shows the most recent posts and comments by your group of contacts. If there are too many posts, an earlier blog entry tends to be pushed off the list before you see it. I’ve several times missed a new entry on one of my ‘favourite’ blogs because of this. Probably should use Technorati more, but it’s so slow!
RSS, Brian. Never miss a thing.