Having been sick for the last couple days, I missed a pretty significant milestone that I meant to blog about.
Just over a year ago, I took the leap and moved from the blog I’d been using for four years to a new platform, a new host and a new domain. On pretty much every level, it’s been a worthwhile move although once I got the basics set-up, I haven’t spent much time playing around and trying other extensions, themes and so on.
Also, my traffic on this blog is still 1/10 (!) of the traffic on my new one. There’s a few reasons for this. The old one has four years of “long tail” which means people doing general searches are approximately 4x as likely to find a relevant result from my old blog as my new one. That one was also more of a focused blog – with the majority of the posts about libraries, library school, libraries intersecting with technology which I know makes it more appealing than the “grab bag” my current blog has become. On that same note, the focus of my old blog means that it is still to this day a resource for new and potential MLIS students – not just those considering Western but schools across Canada who want to know what the process of completing an MLIS is like. And unfortunately, I suspect some of the traffic being captured on that other site is due to spammers/crawlers/Nigerian princes.
I have no idea what the future will bring in terms of my blogging. There are days when I think about packing it all in because it feels like blogging has “jumped the shark”. Nowadays, people spend so much time on social networks and other sites (Kevin Rose of Digg fame made headlines when he announced he was going to stop blogging and just post everything to Google+ soon after that service launched) that blogs seem to becoming the country museums – full of interesting curios and artifacts to the teeming, thriving city high rises of the social networking and other mainstream community sites. I also haven’t done a lot to build bridges between my country blog and the city sites – I don’t actively syndicate my posts into Facebook or Twitter, I’m not on a lot of aggregators. I don’t do much beyond basic SEO for my blog.
I don’t know – I’m from the country. I kinda like the view here…hope you do too! And thanks for stopping by – even though I know it’s out of your way.
Post a Comment