Friday, September 15, 2006
(1:19 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Proactively Meeting the Challenge
Here at The Weblog, we have recently seen a marked uptick in traffic, commenting, and all other indicators of a blog's value for society. This is a natural outgrowth of the core strategies that The Weblog has adhered to all along: building alliances with individual bloggers and certain key group blogs, then hoping that our consistently high-quality product will randomly be linked by such people.For example, recently, we experienced a sustained week-long surge in traffic when Mr. Kotsko's post entitled Rhetorical Strategy was linked by Bitch PhD and then picked up by the very popular blog Making Light, setting off a blogospheric ripple effect that has resulted in that post being on the first page of a Google search for rhetorical strategy. Now a similar effect is taking place due to Belle Waring's link to Dominic's Fay Weldon post on Crooked Timber, followed closely by a recommendation of this site by Scott McLemee on the same blog.
I believe that these two incidents represent the maximum amount of traffic we can hope for from getting occasional links from larger sites. Long-term sustained growth requires a major paradigm shift. Having gotten a certain amount of attention, we need to cultivate new features for The Weblog that will capture people's imaginations and result in habitual visits and RSS subscriptions from people who are not currently enticed by this blog's offerings (which is unfortunately still heavily biased toward LiveJournal-style content from Mr. Kotsko). We cannot expect such innovation to come from Mr. Kotsko, who currently suffers from clinical depression and from being a theology grad student -- two afflictions that may somehow be related. Instead, we must take full advantage of the other authors to maximize blogholder value.
To that end, I have developed a few ideas for recurring series by current Weblog contributors. I encourage other members of our community to share their own ideas in comments:
- Brad's Self-Destructive Adventures: Brad occasionally gives us tantalizing hints of a period in his life that was full of ill-advised stunts, most famously in his occasional enigmatic references to pouring whiskey into a humidifier. Were Brad to make a regular habit of telling such stories, they could be the blogosphere's equivalent to the Charley Murphy segments on Chappelle's Show. Most analysts believe that morbid fascination is the number one key to long-term sustained growth in blog traffic.
- Dominic's Elitist Theory-Laden Thursdays: For this series, Dominic could continue to write in his clear and penetrating prose style, but include a single reference to Zizek or another "theorist" in order to fool readers into thinking that they are reading an aggressively jargonic piece of academic faux-profundity intended solely to make readers feel stupid. A logo involving an image of an extremely large penis could help to cement these readers' sense of inadequacy. If necessary, comments can be turned off for such posts.
- Infinite Pr0n!: I believe this is self-explanatory.
And everyone would know that this blog's current proprietor's motives are pure, since he has been banned from participation in Google's AdSense program due to an unfortunate incident involving an unnamed contributor famous for correcting people's grammar.
