Merry Christmas, all!
Now that that’s out of the way, I’ll get onto my not-related-to-Xmas blog. I was just making use of the holiday in order render an effective pun out of the title…
For the sake of being meta, I’m posting the rest of this admittedly would-be Facebook reply in a blog post. For those of you who are not Brett, Rich, or Megan, don’t feel lost if you read my referencing of their names. Let me catch you up to speed:
Oh. You can’t read that? That’s because wordpress sucks. Paraphrased: We’ve been discussing how potential writers don’t blog as much as they write long facebook replies. And how readers don’t comment as much in blogs as on Facebook.
Well, as you can probably guess what I’m going to say: I think that’s why a lot of people don’t blog in the first place; it may even be our awesome friend Miss Megan’s reason for not doing it? They try, they don’t get as many comments as they would on Facebook, and subsequently, they give up.
And, don’t get me wrong, it’s not a vanity thing.
I think that people who like to write, are full of great opinions, and who are good at it (like my gorgeous, intelligent, and verbose e-buddy, Megan – an avid Facebook poster), enjoy the interactiveness of the topic upon which they’re writing.
They like to write, and they’ll take the time to do so, but they want people to actually reply. Discuss. Debate. Interact.
And unfortunately, for some reason, people only do that on Facebook.
Why?
Is it because you know it is to whom you’re speaking when you comment back and forth? You have a picture there? You can lurk out their page? Is that it? Could be. But that doesn’t explain the multitudes of comments found from randoms and trolls on youtube – except for the fact that it’s easier to watch a video than it is to read.
“Nobody reads print anymore”? Hell, nobody reads anymore. Not unless it’s easy.
I digress.
You see, avid bloggers make the mistake of thinking that great writers who post lengthy FB replies, but who don’t blog, fail to do so either out of laziness or some vanity based: “I want to collect lots of COMMENTS now the way Myspacewhores liked to collect lots of ‘FRIENDS’ back when the year of the 2000’s still had two zero’s in it”.
Rather, I believe that it’s an “I want people to READ and actually REPLY with their THOUGHTS”.
I mean, do you really think that a smart, well-read, girl like my friend Megan doesn’t blog just because two taps of a finger on a keyboard to a blog site is “too hard” for her?
I don’t…
For whatever reason, people see a link to a blog, and they act like its Rougue from X-men. Even if they see my purposely sexy thumbnail, maybe they’ll click it; but once they arrive here, by golly: All those WORDS!
Is the plethora of pictures and puns enough to keep their attention? Or – worse – to comment? Or even worse yet… (assuming they even read it ), is it enough to go all the way back and comment on the Facebook post with the blog link?
As a small time blogger lacking many comments from non-writers, there’s no way of knowing if anyone’s paying attention to my perpetual posts. For some bloggers, one big point in participating at all, is to propagate public opinions on your piece. If not – if you don’t care, and you’re just writing for you, then that’s fine.
I mean, it keeps me returning to Blogdom at least occasionally. Some of us can get by just fine on the “diary” aspect of it:
But, for others, when everyday you see: “zero comments”…”zero comments”…”zero comments”, the “fire under our arses” tends to go out. Don’t blame the Megan’s of the world. The “too lazy to comment-ers” are the lazy ones.
There is a comment region in the blog itself, but I strongly believe that even if a “lesser known” blogger posts some real controversial cataclysm of a composition, that a given reader is still less apt to comment unless he sees another comment from another reader somewhere in the mix.
If they don’t see anyone else commenting, then obviously no one else is reading it, right? There’s no way of knowing! But, either way, what’s the point in sitting down to write or post if it’s not going to be interactive?
And for the for opinionated readers who might have commented on your blog via Facebook at least (where their words will be seen), it’s still far too much trouble to go all the way back to that FB post and comment…
If a blog fails falls in the forest, and nobody comments on it, did anyone ever read it?
I wish I were Rogue. I’d steal Facebook’s powers and bring it to Blogdom.
xoxo
<3~A