So, excited about this website, I clicked on "Write a post". Oh, you want to tie to my twitter account. Nevermind.
You asked for permissions to * See who you follow, and follow new people. * Update your profile. * Post Tweets for you.
This is a no-no for me. I believe you can specify that you want read-only access, which would solve my problem.
Why In the first place?
I plain old don't want to use my twitter account for this, or be forced to create a throwaway account on a completely unrelated service just to have a throwaway account for yours. And all because you can't be arsed to do any real auth, or allow users to post without accounts at all, which given the nature what you've built makes a whole, whole lot of sense. If I want to have to to make an account as a prerequisite to posting a one-off blogpost, I'll go get a blogger account.
I don't care if you promise a whole huggy bunch not to do anything with my twitter account. I don't trust you and I sure as hell don't trust your website's security.
Hahaha, no.
1) Unrealistic Expectations. Most people have no idea what "success" really looks like for a blog. They assume that, if six months have gone by and they're not getting 100,000+ followers, they've failed. Another unrealistic expectation is what I'd call an overly generous self-assessment: the blogger in question overestimates how much gas he has in the tank on a particular topic. He may get a few great ideas in his head one day, then build a blog around them, then find himself struggling for material on the third day.
2) Lack of Patience. Building a successful following is rarely an overnight journey. Some blogs take years to find their footing, and years more to find their audiences.
3) Insufficient or Non-Strategic Marketing. As folks in the startup world are well aware, you really need to think outside the box -- and occasionally go totally wild -- to get attention in today's crowded marketplace of ideas. You've also got to be clever about building credibility, connections to the right influencers, and paths outward from those influencers to broader audiences. By contrast, most hobby-bloggers take a "write it and they will come" approach -- hoping naively that people will flock to their blogs as if called to them by magic. Or they'll blast notices out to all their friends and family, rather than taking a careful inventory of who might actually be interested, who might be very interested, and who might be so interested that she'll tell her friends (or, conversely, who might not give a flying you-know-what). It's counterintuitive to think that starting out by telling fewer people is preferable to shotgunning everyone you know. But the shotgun approach seldom works. Start surgically.
As it turns out, probably 90% of the work of building a successful blog takes place outside of the blog. Writing great content is the easy part (and it's not easy!); getting folks to notice is the hard part.
I was a very active blogger in my native language at some point, but I had only like 50 subscribers and maybe 300 page views in a good week.
I then switched to English and wrote only a dozen of articles or so. One of them was hard to write, basically a HOW-TO article who's implementation I had to write and test before I wrote the article. I also work full-time for a living and it took 3 days to write that article (a really long time for most bloggers).
Enough to say that a single well-researched article was more valuable, bringing in more subscribers than my previous shitty blog on which I talked about shitty things in a fire-and-forget style. And this was also kind of depressing, as if you want to be a successful blogger, you need hundreds of these good articles that take a lot of effort to write.
The way I see it - it's the same as with software development - 80% development / 80% polishing / 80% marketing.
I would add one more point: most people don't fundamentally have a writer's disposition. Writing is hard (if it weren't, we wouldn't have so many professional writers, books on writing, and classes on writing). Having something to say and the means to say it is hard. Having something to say, the means to say it, and the desire to write it is even harder. And so on.
I appear to have that disposition, to the point where I wrote about it some here: http://jseliger.com/2011/02/26/on-blogging-altruistically-or... and wrote about why most people probably drift to Twitter and Facebook: they're easier. If you're not fundamentally blogging for yourself, and because you want to write regularly, you're probably not going to "make" it, for whatever value of "make" you might use.
Once you want to translate that into a blog you really have to flesh it out and ideally read other sources and reference them. We you don't have to but I feel less comfortable just putting something down as opposed to really getting into the idea. Unfortunately all this takes time making me less likely to start it in the first place.
edw519 has mentioned this a bit, very prolific poster that is very well regarded on HN and has a lot to say but struggled to really do it in the blogging medium.
I have a half dozen blogs for different things, my favorite is this one where I post my crazy ideas so I stop myself from actually implementing them and can come back to them later if I still like the idea a week/month later http://ideasfrommydreams.blogspot.com/
In the six years I have had it there has been a total of 3301 page views and maybe five comments and I am ok with that because that isn't where it provides me with value. If comments or page views mattered I would have abandoned this blog years ago.
Blogs and diaries are a great example of what may be a bigger trend: people often begin projects with high hopes, but due to a lack of a clear vision and/or an overestimation of their long-term motivation, it fizzles.
I tried a variety of blog tools. I first had a blog at MIT, then when they killed that service, I tried several of the hip new services like Tumblr, Typepad, and Posterous. I stuck with Posterous the longest, but most recently moved to Wordpress running on my own virtual server. Along the way, I've kept some of my favorite posts from abandoned services, and deleted others that I no longer felt were worth sharing.
But why not write consistently? In my case, I suppose I feel like I frequently have nothing original to add to a topic. There are lots of things I could write about, but why should I, when somebody else already has?
Does it make sense, though, that a blog ought to be held to the standards of original research and contributions to a topic? It's a blog, not a doctoral thesis. So maybe that doesn't make any sense. What, then, should be the purpose of writing, if not to create brand new thoughts?
Expressing who you are and what you know may be reason enough. I would rather hire a consultant that had displayed their knowledge of their field through writing than somebody who just posted a list of skills they had, and I'm more likely to find somebody who can do a particular task if they have written about it than if they had just done the task and posted it on GitHub.
Blogging can be useful to market yourself as a consultant, to market your products you are trying to sell, to make new acquaintances on the web, to build stronger relations with people you already know, to help you improve as a writer and as a thinker... there are all sorts of benefits to blogging besides making original contributions to exposition of a topic. And even though I realize this, I still get stuck a lot on the non-originality thing.
I imagine that a lot of people do.
And then, there are people who just try blogging, realize they don't like it or have other things they'd rather do, and never delete the first post. That's a lot easier to explain, and probably accounts for way more abandoned blogs. :-)
Part of the problem is that many people see blogging as a teaching tool alone. More often than not, it's a conversation starter too, and the blogger ends up learning a great deal of new information in the process.
And even if you wish to be only a teacher with your blog, there is also a bit of Dunning–Kruger effect at play here. You think, what's the point of me explaining X? Everyone knows about X, probably better than me. Others wrote about X.
In truth, you'll find that more often than not plenty of people don't know about X. The way you'd describe and explain X may actually lead people to acquire a new prospective on the subject.
In other words, I end up learning a lot in order to maintain a blog. The D-K effect won't bother one if one accepts the fact that a good blog helps you learn as much as it helps your readers learn. It's more about learning together rather than one person trying to teach other.
The Postary announcement states:
Postary - the simplest way to share posts with no strings attached, no obligations and no expectations. Postary reduces the Blog Lifecycle down to step four: if you are inspired to say something, then just post it and share it with the world
Similarly to suggestions for product landing pages, you do not state how Postary will help me with that, i.e. how the procrastination factor is dealt with. Is there gamification? E-mail reminders? Where is the cheese? Expand on that "simplest way" to sell the idea on me.
Additionally, I will not click-through the "Write a post" button since it requires a Twitter account. Why do I need to login to Twitter, assuming I do have a Twitter account, if you haven't convinced me that there is a reason to waste a couple of minutes of my time?
To sum things up, what differentiates you from, say, Blogspot, Tumblr, Wordpress et al? I can "just post it and share it with the world" over there too.
The difference I guess is that we tried to create a blogging service that isn't a blog you need to maintain to feel good about.
Needs more explanation on what the service does, perhaps a tour. Let me see how it works then if I want it, I'll link with Twitter.
I started my most recent blog back in 2008 to keep track of the projects I was working on and to build a body of work that I could present along with a resume.
A lot of the content I tried to capture was original work I had done; some of it was writing about something I had learned and tried to apply to a proof of concept.
I went with a monthly format and for awhile this worked out well, but as soon as summer would come around- priorities would change and content wouldn't resume until November.
I've gone through that cycle the past four years and this past year I simply haven't had the motivation to stick with it due to projects at work draining me of my enthusiasm and deciding that there are better ways to spend my time than constantly parked in front of a computer.
At least, that's how my personal blog (and a few I tried starting) went, in addition to what you already mention.
I think that it's an awesome ideas, the same way services like "twitpic" offer hosting of free-floating images without the need for a hosting, you offer free-floating blog posts without the setup. I like it!
Anyway - if we can find the time, we may release new features in the near-term that will make it even more interesting! Or we might just procrastinate and not do anything...
It's like wondering why 95% of dates don't lead to marriage.
The more amazing number here, in my opinion, is that 5% of blogs stick around. That seems incredibly high for a broadly popular pursuit. Even a 1% follow-through would strike me as a far better success rate than most common human endeavors.
This will undoubtably work for some, and if you market it properly, you may create a spot for your service; but I'm not sure this is the cure to the 95% of blogs are abandoned problem.
A traditional blog is a lot more work, but it can provide you with an unbelievable degree of rewards and benefits. I think many of these benefits will be lost for those who opt to use your service, at least in its current incarnation.
In my book on technical blogging (http://pragprog.com/book/actb/technical-blogging) I provide a different antidote to abandonment syndrome. I suggest a careful plan and road map that can lead virtually anyone who follows the steps to succeed early on.
Careful planning, knowing what to write and when, learning how to deal with writer's block, and achieving a degree of success early on, all contribute to eliminating the abandonment problem.
Who would abandon a blog that is read by thousands, it's making them money, and helping them further their career? Not many, I suspect, despite the weekly effort required to achieve such goals.
I hear you on the antidote, but I'm not sure it will work for most people. In fact, many people don't have an "expertise" to share and are looking to post thoughts about non-work-related material.
If Postary lets me find several such blogs on its site, organized into blog threads by topic, then it fills a need on both sides: the author gets to broadcast to the web without the pressure of maintaining a blog site or Twitter feed, etc... and the reader is able to find information or commentary on a topic of interest.
It could be almost like a message board, instead of thread topics there are topics (several of which might apply to any given Postary post) and instead of responses to that topic, a threaded view of Postary posts. The threaded view would be composed on-the-fly and would vary depending on what you search for.
To make it more interesting and engaging, each Postary could have the option of being maintained as a blog if the writer so wished... and further, each Postary could allow comments from readers.
So you could post your thoughts about Haskell the day you discover and get really excited by it; and that could be tagged under topics like Haskell, programming philosophy, programming tips, etc. If somebody searched Postary for Haskell, they would see your post along with all others on the same topic, plus comments, plus follow-on posts (if any) by the same author. Threads could be auto-composed based on any number of criteria (newest first, most-responded-to first, etc.)
In this way, the site could serve both the "web archaeology" and "latest and greatest info" niches of search, and could create a lighter, less pressured form of engagement with authors and readers. Isolated, sporadic posting by authors could be organized into a coherent, constantly-updated site on any number of topics.
Why abandon a blog that I've put a great deal of time, even years, into?
For me, it comes down to few things, but mainly a work vs reward measuring. Doing a good (or even decent) blog takes a lot of work. I'm honestly not the best writer in the world, and creating a blog that's on topic consistently and creating that amount of rich content is just hard.
I found my traffic was always good if I could blog at least 3x/week, but really 1x/day was the very best. Even if you're doing that by sitting down and queuing up content for the week, that's a lot of effort (generally an entire day) just to blog consistently.
What I always wanted to do, was to get together a group blog with 5-10 friends, which we could all contribute to on some semi-consistent topic (like Mashable, Techcrunch, etc but smaller in scope and goal). Then each person doing 1-2 things a week would be totally sufficient and keep things interesting.
Yet, the reward for this was always pretty low. I didn't like putting ads on my site. Amazon referral links were pretty good on occasion, but if you don't have a product oriented blog (or huge traffic) it still barely paid for hosting. So 1 day/week (15% of your time) for that much coming back to me was pretty low.
I do keep 3 bloggy things, but 2 only get updated with useful info, and the other is where I mumble about my personal life (which no one but me cares about generally).
My main blog, which I've had the longest, has 500K hits, with an average of between 12K-16K per month. Am I happy with that? Sure, but it's not a money-maker. From what I've read, one needs to attract upwards of 100K visitors/month to be able to make some money from it. Currently, 130 people subscribe to my main (Wordpress) blog, though I don't believe WP offered the 'subscribe' widget the entire time I've been with them.
In the meantime, I've used the main blog's template, topic-wise, to create around 10 other blogs on other subjects. I eventually got burnt out and consolidated to 3 but then I deleted the least popular and stopped updating the second to last.
At my height, which I sustained for around 3 years, I was posting between one and two posts per day. For the main blog, I also made cards to hand out and tees to sell.
What I essentially did the majority of my time is curation and curation is a lot easier (if you know how to do it) than coming up with original content, which is what I've been doing with the main blog for most of 2011 when I switched gears. 'Coincidentally', this is also when many readers said bye-bye.
People I share links with, who blog on the same topic, usually write personal blogs and a few of them get 20-50 comments with every post. I, on the other hand, am lucky if I get 2-3. Basically, I get more hits but less comments.
All in all, I see my retirement from blogging in the near future because I feel I've mastered the topic (culture, by the way). It is said that it takes 8000-10000 hours of study to become an expert on something (a mark which I passed a few years back). The only problem is I'm a generalist at heart.
If you just dash off whatever comes to mind nobody will bother reading what you've written, so you're wasting your time. If you put a lot of time and energy into your posts then at some point you've put in the same amount of effort it would have taken to write a book, but you have less to show for it.
I guess if you just enjoy writing a blog it's fine. But like any hobby it will get old eventually, so it doesn't surprise me so many are abandoned.
The blogs that seem to be successful over the long run are either news-aggregation type affairs, where it's mostly just links with a pithy joke or two thrown in, or they're single subject blogs with multiple people sharing the load. It's just too much work for one person to generate enough original content to hold the attention of a regular reader base.
For me, the problem is the inherent sense of obligation implied when organizing posts by date. My last post was written April, 2009, which reported that I redesigned and restaged my blog.
Ironic, isn't it?
There are many ways to solve this problem. Postary's picked a really good one, and I'm looking forward to seeing how people responds to using them. But I know it's not the only way to address this problem.
These days I'm rethinking the way I write and publish. I like easy-to-publish. I like self-hosting. I don't want databases - static site generation for me please. I like blending in my activities on other sites (like Twitter). I don't like date-based organization (it doesn't make sense for the way I do my writing).
So I'm looking for (or writing) tools that support folksonomy-based URI navigation (which supports organic site growth), easy-publish, and importing and reformatting data from other social networks. If you have any pointers, send 'em my way.
The other thing I think this type of system should do is to aggregate the content. Encourage tagging and referencing of posts throughout the system, rather than siloing to a single author, and find ways to rank the content. Youtube is a good model. Rationale as follows:
I am often inspired on the spur of the moment to write detailed comments of sizes between a few paragraphs to the length of a short essay. And yet I know that most comments end up buried forever in an old discussion thread, never seeing the light of day again, regardless of their value.
So my thinking is that if we had a system that blurs "comments" and "articles" and tried to facilitate a discussion curated over years instead of hours, more value could be captured.
No next or previous post buttons, probably no comments, just a title and body. Then a pool of photos/themes to present your information nicely. No feeling of abandonment or fear of commitment.
Not sure without further thought how this could be taken to the next level, but it's at least a nice side-project worth trying.
Your tool combined with my wondering led to this trolltacular literary masterpiece. http://www.postary.com/twitter/Detrus/abandoning-a-post
It's more bare bones (really bare bones, heh) and allows anonymous posts.
Hmm, even I abandoned posting there, though I'm not much of a poster in the first place.
[1]: http://kodig.com/
Most people don't have either when it comes to blogging since there aren't really instant rewards for blogging and no pain if they don't blog.
