Passionate blogs are the ones that endure
If you’ve been around the Blogosphere even for only just a little while, you’ve probably read about A-List bloggers. Supposedly these are the most popular, linked-to, and visited bloggers on the planet. Where did this list come from? Is it accurate? At Wikipedia’s entry on ‘Blogebrity‘ you can get a little insight into the controversial list which was created by an Internet project in 2005 called Blogebrity. Here it is: After clicking down the list in an attempt to see what makes an ‘a-lister’ so popular (Is it content, style; layout?), I discovered one simple truth: they’d all blogged very recently; nearly all of them have endured over time and kept posting regularly.
After looking at many of the blogs, I came across a name that I’d read about many times when people were mentioning famous bloggers: Steve Rubel. I had a quick look down through his recent posts and was grabbed by a very short one about ‘How to prevent blog burnout.’ This interested me because many of the blogs I’ve visited on my searches have long since died on the wayside of the proverbial desert highway of eternity. In this short post he linked to an interesting News article called ‘Keep those weblogs cracking.’ at the Orlando Sentinel, as well an older post of his own (it’s always good to link back to your own previous posts to give new readers more insight into who you are) called ‘Blog from the gut of your company’. These are both interesting pieces, and for me a chord was struck relating to what makes for a good, enduring blog. The two main ideas (and they are quite simple) are about being truly passionate about the subject you are investing so much time in writing about, and about being true to yourself.
The News article mentions a popular blogger named Stephanie Klein (She’s on that a-list!) who although having been seen as being contentious in terms of her internal-life focus, has endured a long time and attracted quite a large following of readers. She believes it’s because she’s true to herself, and more importantly, is passionate about her topic: Her own life!
In Rubel’s second post he talks about how he would buy a Dell computer over another brand because of what he reads about in the blog of one of its employees. He says that it’s an interesting phenomenon that a worker way down the line of company hierarchy can give a company more integrity than the blogging ‘voice’ of a CEO. It’s hard for us to trust marketers and CEOs who have their own interest so tied into what they’re doing. An employee reeks of credence because they have no reason to write except to tell others what they feel from the heart, or the gut.
Jesse S. Somer writes his name after each post to remind himself who he is. One of his passions is to find out more about himself and the other worldly brothers and sisters around him. That’s why he blogs.
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