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March 13, 2006

Writing About Writing About Writely

IrishWonder has a great case study on why people tend to do perhaps the laziest form of blogging (newsblogging) and the pros and cons involved. He bases the study around Google’s recent acquisition of the company that makes the Writely web-based word processing software.

Why would you want to newsblog? It's a seductively easy way to drive traffic to your site, thanks to things like trackbacks and Technorati. The trackback from Google's blog alone can easily send to 100 visitors in a day, provided you get your link on there early. I'm guilty of it myself, as you can see from my last few posts.

He also points to a few blogs to demonstrate the different styles of newsblogging, including one that's using the mother of all trackbacking techniques - short quotes from a large number of blogs all talking about the same thing. (In fairness, it's a great post on a pretty cool site, and they're probably not mass-trackbacking intentionally. Still, it works.)

Personally, I find it hard to give up newsblogging. It seems like most of the time I write something I think is really cool or insightful, I hear crickets chirping. But many of my posts about the latest Google or Yahoo hiccup will send me a ton of visitors (well, a few hundred, usually) and even pick up some pretty good links. There's been many times where I've thought, "Why am I even bothering to blog this?", and it turns out to be one of my most heavily trafficked and linked pages. Go figure.

Thre's no shame in it. Some of the top search blogs today got a big chunk of their early exposure trackbacking like a MF. But I've noticed that the only search blogs I tend to read on a regular basis are those with highly original ideas.

Oh, and by the way, Google's mapping mars ;)

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