Blogger's Secret

The long, slow business of accumulating content

One of the weblogs that I run, Vacuum, has been going for more than 10 years. The last 8 years or so of it are online on Typepad. That's a lot of typing, more than 2000 posts in all.

When I look at the statistics for that weblog, there are a few things that jump out at me. One is simple: a very small handful of posts from the past, where I spent a lot of work to put something together, generate a lot of traffic. In particular, the 50 state power outage maps posting gets search traffic (and links from utility company intranets) and lights up when the lights go dark.

I could not have promised you when I started writing that this would have been the one bit of work that appeals to the world more than anything else I've done to date. It didn't start out as an ambitious plan; rather, it was the end result of watching storms wreck utility infrastructure and wondering how on earth to find a power outage map for some arbitrary city without knowing in advance what utility company serviced that area. The edits that I have accumulated over time - and am still likely to do when there's widespread severe storms or electrical disruptions - have slowly made the piece noteworthy, much more noteworthy than the first draft.

If you are writing and one of your targets is search traffic, be prepared to edit and go back to good posts that get a lot of traffic and use the search keywords that do find the page to make the page better. This is particularly the case if you are writing something that's a big long list. You can notice after the fact that you missed something, and update the list to reflect the new information.

Of course, you don't always have to chase search engine traffic, and optimizing your writing for humans is always better than playing to fickle search algoriths. It may take a while for one piece from the word-hoard you are accumulating to stick out as worthy of further attention and love. Once something sticks out as noteworthy, find the time to polish it up and keep improving it.

It's worth writing it down, even if you don't know who the audience is yet

There are times when you need to write something down and publish it, not because you think that you know who needs to see it, but simply because you need to know that you can find it again by searching for it.

The internet is vast and ever changing, and rather than rely on your ability to search for what you once found, try making a copy of the relevant portions (with whatever annotations you need to provide a context). Even a paragraph worth of clipping, when added to a paragraph of insight, is enough of an anchor point that if the original goes missing you can still reconstruct that understanding of your own.

The tradition that you are drawing from is of the commonplace book.  Happily, I wrote about this a few years ago, so now I can quote from myself:

7. Quote from people who you respect. An early writing practice was a "commonplace book", where the literate people of the pre-Xerox, pre-Internet day copied out by hand passages from other works that they wanted to save and make their own. Pieces of poetry, bits of news, copies of messages you want to fix in time, can all go into a blog stream to be commented on and added to. Tip: only quote from people who you respect, because the last thing you want is to be on the top of a search queue for something you don't care anything about.

It looks like Harvard has a nice collection of commonplace books online:

The commonplace book has its origins in antiquity in the idea of loci communes, or "common places," under which ideas or arguments could be located in order to be used in different situations. The florilegium, or "gathering of flowers," of the Middle Ages and early modern era, collected excerpts primarily on religious and theological themes. Commonplace books flourished during the Renaissance and early modern period: students and scholars were encouraged to keep commonplace books for study, and printed commonplace books offered models for organizing and arranging excerpts. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries printed commonplace books, such as John Locke’s A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books(1706), continued to offer new models of arrangement. The practice of commonplacing continued to thrive in the modern era, as writers appropriated the form for compiling passages on various topics, including the law, science, alchemy, ballads, and theology. The manuscript commonplace books in this collection demonstrate varying degrees and diverse methods of organization, reflecting the idiosyncratic interests and practices of individual readers.

A part of the blogging practice is the practice of collection, and the commonplace style is the response to the need to make copies in order to make something your own and for future use.