A Fuller View

First, off - Happy New Year! Second, thanks to all my readers - I will see all three of you down at the pub later this week…

So, what have I learned so far about blogging? Well, now that I’ve been at it with some degree of effort for the past 3 months and managed to rack up just over 100 posts here are my observations:

1. Blogging is harder than it looks. Harder in terms of doing it well, doing it regularly and still making sense.
2. Blogging takes effort and commitment. You need to be dedicated or getting paid.
3. There are a lot of very good blogs out there and in my industry sector (= tech, search, advertising and web 2.0) these blogs offer the best source of information, trends, analysis and comment. Now I just need to figure out the best way to personally aggregate this into my own “web zine.” Note: there are also lots of good blogs covering other topics (see comment 5 on potential impact.)
4. Some blogs are weak and there is spam. Plenty of dross out there, but its easy to spot the wheat from the chaff.
5. Blogging or more generically the ability for anyone to publisher globally in a fast, cheap, easy and with pretty good quality (in term of how it looks) is in the process of changing the media landscape forever! This is huge and monumental shift. The impact on “traditional” media organizations (newspapers, magazines, TV etc) is probably only half way through the shift. This topic alone is worthy of coverage for the next few years…
6. I’ve learned a little bit about how to drive and generate traffic. I am sure any good blog tip site or SEO would already know many of these things, but its interesting and fun to see it 1st hand. Being early on a “big” story, track backs, the detail of content, freshness and uniqueness all drive traffic. With out trying I have had some interesting spikes (from daily avg page impressions of 10-15 to above 100 for example).
7. Fun and addictive. Yes, blogging is fun and can be addictive.

I will continue to blog for the foreseeable future. My goals on this front for 2008 are:

• Improve the quality of my content with probably less posts but more depth when time allows
• Develop some better defined core areas to cover - but am still debating which ones
• Learn some proper journalism skills
• Figure out better ways to tag and aggregate other blog content
• Develop a monthly or bi-monthly summary piece

btw - being offline over most of the holiday was a good break. Now its time to catch up and put together some predictions for 2008…