Dolmere Talamasca - Second Life "resident"

It's not frustrating to me, well other than that bullshit with the top sites thing - thankfully she seems to have decided to move on to other endeavors. Things can be frustrating if you let them be. I'm just trying to have some fun with my blog, offer thoughts and a cookie crumb trail and possibly get some spare pennies from adsense if I'm lucky.

"People have enough different rankings to keep up with." I suppose this may be true. I like to drop by and see how things stand once in a while. I do pop by technorati once in a while now that I understand what it is, I do pop over to the top sites page once in a while (though a lot less more than before). The site that I check the most is Google analytics - it sums things up so nicely and lets me dig down in various ways.

"Knowing that daily updates are important, bloggers often tend to focus more on quantity than quality." Coal Nelson is the one who has given me a voice by donating this blog space (so blame her). When I first created one I really didn't know what I wanted to do with it. Now that I'm almost 500 posts into using the thing I can still say I REALLY don't know what I'm doing with it. It's an outlet for expression, it's a journal, it's a place to share and communicate with friends when SL is down or I'm not logged in, it's kinda fun.

Coal and I had talked about posting frequency a few times. It's easy to neglect a blog - it takes time and energy to put posts together and we lead busy lives. I had suggested to her that posting more frequent smaller posts might be the trick. It gets you closer to that "daily update" that Looker is talking about but it also gets you to post at all. It's so easy to avoid posting that big entry when you're trying to put together a well thought out perfect post. You just keep putting it off because your thoughts aren't fully formulated or it needs more punch or whatever today's excuse is. Well, we're not writing novels here, we're posting thoughts and snippets of thoughts for the most part so somewhere along the way I decided small frequent posts would be my objective with a few longer gems here and there as possible. This might be a good point for me to bring up, again, that bloggers are not journalists - they're not so stop fooling yourselves.

I adding Google adverts some months ago in the hopes that I might be able to monetize some of the traffic the blog gets. That might have changed my posting frequency, I think it has. I'm more likely to keep those frequent small posts coming now that there's a small incentive involved. I don't think it has really changed my posting topics - I'm still all over the map and rambling about anything that crosses my mind.

I suppose I can sum this section's response up as "Dolmere's blog is not quality. He tries his best, but if you're looking for real quality I suggest continuing your search. With that said you're welcome to look around at your leisure."

"This is why a lot of people have started a daily post which has links to recommended blogs. This gives them an easy way to do a daily update, as well as a possibility to give someone else an inbound link, wishing for someone to return the favor, so they can climb even further up the Technorati ladder."

In my case I don't agree. I have been doing my "quicklies/link wrapup" posts for quite a while. They're more a combination of bookmarks for myself and simply sharing interesting things I've found in my web surfing travels. Let's see - I share pictures, stories and random thoughts about my SL adventures, my quicklies are just a summary of my web surfing adventures. When I'm surfing around worldofsl or something I'll see a page and think "Oh, that's cool - MUST share this... must share..." and boom - there it is :)

I also like to post links to sites that have linked to me. Is it because of reciprocal linking and the hope that I get more incoming links from the practice? Actually that's too obvious, way too organized and I barely thought of it. Now that I think about it - great idea, haha. Instead the real reason is nastier. I'm just tickled pink that someone linked to me! My silly little blog? Something I had to say was worth linking to? Cool - so I want to let me readers know about it :) A form of boasting maybe, a form of bookmarking certainly, haha.

"So the more views you get, the more chance there is that someone would leave a comment. And that is what it is all about."

Perhaps it is what it's all about. It certainly is rewarding when comments come through - a good feeling. However, I know I'd keep posting my babbling regardless since I did it for quite a while in the beginning with barely a comment or reader. With that said - please keep the comments coming folks, it keeps the fun-o-meter pegged around here.

"But to achieve that, we have to wait and to try different things, such as subscribing to SLTopsites. This ranking is obviously not loved by all bloggers, yet it gives an opportunity to advertise your own blog to other members and visitors of this ranking page."

I'd sum it up as marketing tools. It's nice to have readers, nice to have comments so why not attempt to get the word out as is possible?

"Personally I try, and I say try, to write a quality post , about something I read or saw...., but that ain't always easy."

I think Looker's been doing a fine job of this on his blog. I feel exactly the same way - I try to post quality posts as possible. It certainly is not easy. Putting the content together takes time. Also, no matter how often I reread a post before hitting that post button there's always something I've missed in there.

"I must say that reading a blog with quality content, but a pagerank on 0, has more value than one with a higher pagerank but no quality content."

This goes back to my comments from some earlier posts - "it's the content stupid". That may also be why I don't use a feedreader service. I am not loyal to any single provider - I surf and find material that catches my eye. I don't continually return to the same blog or news service or even television channel for that matter out of some sense of loyalty. If there is content worth reading or watching I'll find it.

Let's close this out with Looker's rather perfect summary.
[So we're] "trying to write quality stuff, but thinking in the back of our heads on the rankings."