TODAY: Don’t kill yourself trying to get noticed

There are much bet­ter ways of get­ting your blogs noticed – try being interesting!

WITH more than 60 mil­lion blogs in the world, what are your blog’s chances of get­ting noticed? And can you improve these chances?

Even with online tools like Tech­no­rati (technorati.com) and RSS (really sim­ple syn­di­ca­tion, a tool avail­able on most web por­tals like MSN and Google) which help read­ers sub­scribe to sites and organ­ise their list of things to read online, you’ll still have to do some­thing to catch their atten­tion and make a visit to your site worth their while.

To that end, blog­ger Blinky­mummy (blinkymummy.blogspot.com), a 29-year-old lists what she thinks makes read­ers sit up and take note of blogs.

Say­ing that she has been “los­ing read­er­ship”, she won­ders if she’d gain more fans if she were to “scold hand­i­cap peo­ple with no hes­i­ta­tion, go for extreme plas­tic surgery or com­mit blog sui­cide because of flamers”.

Read more at TODAY­on­line

Tech­no­rati Tags: blog, blogi­cide, daph­ne­teo, Sin­ga­pore, tech­no­rati, TODAY

Now, that last bit — com­mit­ting blog sui­cide — more pop­u­larly known online as “blogi­cide”, seems to be a pop­u­lar way of get­ting atten­tion, as the num­ber of com­ments that fol­low a blog post pro­claim­ing the end of the blog would attest. You get peo­ple who don’t want you to kill your blog and you get peo­ple who want to know why you killed your blog — instant increase in readership!

There have been so many blogi­cides lately that some of the edi­tors at local blog aggre­ga­tor, Tomorrow.sg, are think­ing of set­ting up an obit­u­ar­ies sec­tion list­ing these on a weekly basis.

One erst­while blog­ger, Very Poi­so­nous Lady (verypoisonouslady.blogspot.com), closed her blog by delet­ing her posts from pub­lic view, leav­ing only the mes­sage­board on the site, which has been inun­dated with mes­sages of good­will and pleas for her return.

Another, Daphne Teo (bleedingblackbutterflies.blogspot.com), deleted her site com­pletely, but this act spawned a whole slew of com­men­tary on other blogs and a flurry of search engine requests for infor­ma­tion about her, cat­a­pult­ing her name into the top 10 of search terms on Technorati.

Top 10 out of 60 mil­lion blogs. See? It works! If she hadn’t com­mit­ted blogi­cide, I wouldn’t have known who Daphne Teo was! And when I did, I too wanted to find out why she killed her blog!

Apart from try­ing to get atten­tion, there must be other legit­i­mate rea­sons for vol­un­tar­ily dis­con­tin­u­ing a blog. At the other end of the spec­trum, some blog­gers close their sites when they get too much unwanted atten­tion, like Deliri­ous Dream (deliriousdream.blogspot.com), a (for­mer) blog­ger read­ers believed to be a TV actress, and who closed down her blog because, well, peo­ple believed her to be a TV actress.

Of course, the atten­tion you get from killing a blog is always fleet­ing. A blog that keeps read­ers com­ing back is one that always has a story to tell. One blog that caught my atten­tion is called Good Morn­ing Yes­ter­day (goodmorningyesterday.blogspot.com), because its writ­ten by some­one born in 1952, prob­a­bly mak­ing him one of the old­est known blog­gers in Singapore.

Mr Lam Chun See has taken pains to doc­u­ment things about Sin­ga­pore he thinks are quickly van­ish­ing, or which have van­ished from all but his memory.

His mem­o­ries of Chi­na­town are def­i­nitely worth a read, and you know he’s already become an avid blog­ger because he decides to go down to the scene of one of his friend’s sto­ries, just to take a look:

“My friend Chun Sing’s descrip­tion of life in Sago Street and Sago Lane is so inter­est­ing, I could not resist going there to take a look. Besides tak­ing some pic­tures of the area, I also helped myself to a nice bowl of beef noo­dle from the Chi­na­town hawker centre.”

This encap­su­lates what blogging’s about — it makes me want to go down to Sago Lane and illus­trate Mr Lam’s sto­ries with what I see with my own eyes, maybe accom­pa­nied by a bowl of beef noodles.

Mr Miyagi aka Ben­jamin Lee has been enter­tain­ing read­ers at miyagi.sg for over a year, and is very happy to know that there are blog­gers much older than him.