Blogging Limits
This post contains details about blogs and blogging in general and this one in particular. To introduce the subject it might be helpful to understand what a blog is. Blog is an abbreviated term for "web log." Logs are simply records. They may be used by truckers, gardeners, food preservers, sports enthusiasts, those who keep a diary, and by those who journal. A web log can be any of the above types, if it's posted on the internet. To summarize: A blog is an internet record. On this blog, it's a record of my thoughts, and sometimes of events around me.
To make the following laborious information a little more comprehensible, I'm using side-headings.
Blog Audience--Legitimate or Illegitimate?
I heard recently from someone that he didn't respond to something that concerned him on a blog "because it wasn't written to me." I wondered if that person understood the blogging communication platform. I see it as being at least as correct to say, about anyone's public blog, that "it was written to me as much as to anyone else" as to say "it wasn't written to me." They are, of course, both true in a sense, and a private decision to act or not act is the deciding factor--not whether or not one is a legitimate audience member. There are no illegitimate audience members.
Blog Audience--Limited or Unlimited?
A blog audience can be both a very limited audience and a completely unlimited audience. It is limited in two ways: 1) Only those who learn about the blog's existence will ever access the content 2) Only those who make a choice to read it will do so.
A blog audience is unlimited in the sense that no one can be blocked from reading it or responding to it unless the blogger makes a choice to block certain people from reading it or responding to it, or unless the blogger makes it inaccessible to search engines. Targeting a particular audience through a blog is not really possible in any guaranteed-to-be-effective way because of the blogger's default inability or unwillingness to deny access or to guarantee it.
Blogs and Comments--Public or Private?
My blog is public, which means that no one is blocked from reading it.
No one is blocked from commenting, so I'm roughly categorizing comments as public too, but currently only moderated comments can be posted. This means simply that I see the comments before others see them, and I can decide whether or not I want them posted. I recall only once (years ago?) ever failing to post a comment that was submitted for the blog--except for spam--which is the only reason I bother with the moderation of comments at all. I'm not interested in promoting the business of someone in S. Car. who does custom work with a telehandler--just because I mentioned on my blog a job Shane once did with a telehandler, and someone from that business found the blog post. The "comment" was obviously a business-grabbing ploy--and that was actually one of the least objectionable comments I've ever gotten along that line. That's the kind of spam I don't publish.
Comment-Moderating Prerogative
I claim advice from Dorcas Smucker (who is a widely-read Mennonite blogger) in having deleted that one comment. She told me six years ago when I first began blogging "You're the queen of your blog." She said it in the context of not allowing a conversation to take place on your blog if the content is unacceptable to you. I recount my personal record so that you know that I will almost always publish your comment even if I don't agree with you. The comment I did not publish seemed to me to go on too long about a matter that had already been thoroughly discussed on the blog. Multiple earlier comments from that person had been published on the same subject.
Identifying Blog Readers
I have only a limited knowledge of who reads the blog. People who comment relevantly on a single post have obviously read that post, and if they sign their name, I might know who they are. (I greatly prefer signed comments to unsigned ones, and am especially averse to publishing unsigned comments, although I have so far not discriminated between signed and unsigned ones.) A few more than a handful of people "follow" this blog, which means that they are notified every time a new post is published. I can see only what they have chosen to reveal of their identity. In most cases, it's a first name. I don't know most of the people who follow the blog, but I appreciate their interest. I know that some of the followers are men, but I'm guessing that most of my regular "non-follower" readers are either young people or women.
Another way of vaguely identifying people who visit the blog is through Statcounter, a tracking program that tallies the number of visits to the blog, the internet service provider they have, and the city/state address of the provider. The statistics can be broken down in various ways geographically--by state and country, most easily.
Statcounter has a "recently came from" feature, which lets me see where people are finding links to the blog, if so, or whether they already know my blog address and type it into the search engine whenever they visit. The latter list is longer by far.
Statcounter also has a "keyword search" feature. From this feature, I learned, for example, that when people visit the blog from parts of the world where I don't know anyone (people from 94 different countries have been here), it's most often because they've followed a link on a website that describes how to make amazaki, a Japanese drink that I wrote about once when Hiromi made it. The person who posted a link to that specific post on my blog on their website had apparently found my post through a search engine. Now, if I see that "amazaki" was typed into the search engine, I know that either they found my blog directly that way, or they found it via the website that linked to my blog. This is not usually a long list.
More Statistics
Statcounter also tells me that I have posted well over 1,000 times on this website. I have so far never assigned any posts to a certain category, as some bloggers do. In this way they create a Table of Contents of sorts. I have no Table of Contents, but the blog is searchable. I use the search function sometimes to see if I already wrote about something--when I can't remember if I did so.
I note that when someone has read only a very few of those 1,000 + posts and then assumes that they know how I am or what I think, they are drawing those conclusions from a very limited sampling, especially if they don't interact with me personally elsewhere. If they find "targets" in the content, they may be making unwarranted assumptions about the medium or my use of it--a tendency that would be reduced with a fairer sampling, as I see it.
Bloggers run the risk of having others draw conclusions or assign blame based on selective sampling. It is this dynamic that I find the most difficult to deal with personally. I realize, however, that it comes with the territory of allowing public access to my thoughts put into words--with no ability to control any of the results. In this matter, blogging as a communication medium has definite limits.
To make the following laborious information a little more comprehensible, I'm using side-headings.
Blog Audience--Legitimate or Illegitimate?
I heard recently from someone that he didn't respond to something that concerned him on a blog "because it wasn't written to me." I wondered if that person understood the blogging communication platform. I see it as being at least as correct to say, about anyone's public blog, that "it was written to me as much as to anyone else" as to say "it wasn't written to me." They are, of course, both true in a sense, and a private decision to act or not act is the deciding factor--not whether or not one is a legitimate audience member. There are no illegitimate audience members.
Blog Audience--Limited or Unlimited?
A blog audience can be both a very limited audience and a completely unlimited audience. It is limited in two ways: 1) Only those who learn about the blog's existence will ever access the content 2) Only those who make a choice to read it will do so.
A blog audience is unlimited in the sense that no one can be blocked from reading it or responding to it unless the blogger makes a choice to block certain people from reading it or responding to it, or unless the blogger makes it inaccessible to search engines. Targeting a particular audience through a blog is not really possible in any guaranteed-to-be-effective way because of the blogger's default inability or unwillingness to deny access or to guarantee it.
Blogs and Comments--Public or Private?
My blog is public, which means that no one is blocked from reading it.
No one is blocked from commenting, so I'm roughly categorizing comments as public too, but currently only moderated comments can be posted. This means simply that I see the comments before others see them, and I can decide whether or not I want them posted. I recall only once (years ago?) ever failing to post a comment that was submitted for the blog--except for spam--which is the only reason I bother with the moderation of comments at all. I'm not interested in promoting the business of someone in S. Car. who does custom work with a telehandler--just because I mentioned on my blog a job Shane once did with a telehandler, and someone from that business found the blog post. The "comment" was obviously a business-grabbing ploy--and that was actually one of the least objectionable comments I've ever gotten along that line. That's the kind of spam I don't publish.
Comment-Moderating Prerogative
I claim advice from Dorcas Smucker (who is a widely-read Mennonite blogger) in having deleted that one comment. She told me six years ago when I first began blogging "You're the queen of your blog." She said it in the context of not allowing a conversation to take place on your blog if the content is unacceptable to you. I recount my personal record so that you know that I will almost always publish your comment even if I don't agree with you. The comment I did not publish seemed to me to go on too long about a matter that had already been thoroughly discussed on the blog. Multiple earlier comments from that person had been published on the same subject.
Identifying Blog Readers
I have only a limited knowledge of who reads the blog. People who comment relevantly on a single post have obviously read that post, and if they sign their name, I might know who they are. (I greatly prefer signed comments to unsigned ones, and am especially averse to publishing unsigned comments, although I have so far not discriminated between signed and unsigned ones.) A few more than a handful of people "follow" this blog, which means that they are notified every time a new post is published. I can see only what they have chosen to reveal of their identity. In most cases, it's a first name. I don't know most of the people who follow the blog, but I appreciate their interest. I know that some of the followers are men, but I'm guessing that most of my regular "non-follower" readers are either young people or women.
Another way of vaguely identifying people who visit the blog is through Statcounter, a tracking program that tallies the number of visits to the blog, the internet service provider they have, and the city/state address of the provider. The statistics can be broken down in various ways geographically--by state and country, most easily.
Statcounter has a "recently came from" feature, which lets me see where people are finding links to the blog, if so, or whether they already know my blog address and type it into the search engine whenever they visit. The latter list is longer by far.
Statcounter also has a "keyword search" feature. From this feature, I learned, for example, that when people visit the blog from parts of the world where I don't know anyone (people from 94 different countries have been here), it's most often because they've followed a link on a website that describes how to make amazaki, a Japanese drink that I wrote about once when Hiromi made it. The person who posted a link to that specific post on my blog on their website had apparently found my post through a search engine. Now, if I see that "amazaki" was typed into the search engine, I know that either they found my blog directly that way, or they found it via the website that linked to my blog. This is not usually a long list.
More Statistics
Statcounter also tells me that I have posted well over 1,000 times on this website. I have so far never assigned any posts to a certain category, as some bloggers do. In this way they create a Table of Contents of sorts. I have no Table of Contents, but the blog is searchable. I use the search function sometimes to see if I already wrote about something--when I can't remember if I did so.
I note that when someone has read only a very few of those 1,000 + posts and then assumes that they know how I am or what I think, they are drawing those conclusions from a very limited sampling, especially if they don't interact with me personally elsewhere. If they find "targets" in the content, they may be making unwarranted assumptions about the medium or my use of it--a tendency that would be reduced with a fairer sampling, as I see it.
Bloggers run the risk of having others draw conclusions or assign blame based on selective sampling. It is this dynamic that I find the most difficult to deal with personally. I realize, however, that it comes with the territory of allowing public access to my thoughts put into words--with no ability to control any of the results. In this matter, blogging as a communication medium has definite limits.
posted by Mrs. I (Miriam Iwashige) at
9:57 AM
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