Secrets of the seven basic blog posts
Matt Brown
Wednesday, 04 June 2008 09:34 UTC
A great little commentary over on Wired hypothesising seven basic blog post themes.
1. Be upset
2. Buy a thing
3. Animals are cute
4. People are dumb
5. Something I like, only different
6. Weird science
7. Me, the blogger
-
Replies
-
Well, I’ve never done number 3.
You wouldn’t catch me doing 6 either: that would be revealing work secrets. If only you knew what book I received through the post today…
-
I plead guilty to all seven. I think they all boil down to a single meta-theme, if you will, which goes Me! Me! Me!.
And I agree about Bob and cute animals. He never touches that subject. But I’m keen to know about the book he received in the post…
-
Of course I don’t know Bob’s secrets, but I just received Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments by another Bob in the mail. But in general there isn’t a lot of #6 here on NN.
-
Let’s see… in the past week, on two blogs, I have let my cat write a post about fossil-inspired cat toys (3 and 5), muttered about open access (1), asked people to donate money for our cancer charity thing (2 and 7), laughed about 1950s views of women in the lab (4), and pointed out (as comment on a Dr Who clip) that humans are covered in bacteria (6).
-
I would argue that 1 and 4 are frequently the same thing. Ranting posts certainly get a lot of attention (as I, sort of unfortunately) know from personal experience. I get very annoyed when people pot inflammatory things on purpose, to get traffic or rile up a reaction. Posts like that are pretty transparent though.
Number 7 is pretty spot on too. Bloggers who blog about blogging are becoming more commonplace as well. Those are just funny. Meta-theme indeed.
-
A couple of months ago I deliberately wrote a post commenting on a certain NN personality’s impressive tally. I followed that up with a completely nonsensical post designed to get a lot of hits.
Both got a lot of hits, but interestingly, not as many as the rather long and serious post last week on Web 2.
Myth busted.
-
Yup, certainly works. Having read all the comments I now find myself irresistibly drawn to the blogs of all ‘sinners’.
-
It seems to omit memes, quizzes, polls and those “what kind of an x are you?” widgets, all of which are incredibly popular.
It also omits lists, for example people’s reading “challenges” as they call them.Richard, maybe your web 2.0 post falls into another popular category, “web 2.0” (or “technoposts”?). I think bloggers (and others) love writing about web, social interactivity thereof, facebook vs myspace, what’s the next trend, stats, hacks for various platforms, all that kind of thing.
I think posts such as reviews (of books, films and so on), creative posts (poems and other creative writing) or essays are popular in terms of people reading them, but I wouldn’t say they fall into (5), as they are closer to journalism or creative writing per se, than blogging.
-
Interesting premise. Purported non-fiction only gets told in a few ways, the same that fiction does, too.
For my own posts, I think that there are a few overtones of 1, and then mostly 5 and 7 with a smattering of 6, and all that would certainly explain the lowish traffic.
Matt, aren’t you going to provide a link to that YouTube movie of the slow-witted centaur trying to get his Darth Vader mask off with his hooves?
-
