2 Responses to ““Asides” Are A Kind of Procrastination Dash for Blogging”

1. Maria :
   August 5th, 2007 at 12:17 pm | Permalink

   I remember that post on 43 Folders; it was one of Merlin’s better efforts.

   Procrastination keeps me from doing at least 50% of what I’m capable of doing. (But since I still manage to do quite a bit, no one really notices except me.)

   As for your “asides” here, let me share something with you.

   Yesterday, I educated my husband about the concept of professional blogging. (For the record, I’m not a professional blogger and don’t plan on becoming one; he won’t either.) To illustrate the kinds of things a professional blogger posts on his blog, I showed him Problogger.net. (Can’t get much more than a professional blogger than Darren Rowse, right?)

   What we found were that more than half of his Home Page posts were 250 words or less and a big bunch of them were just link lists. My husband was not very impressed. (He doesn’t see the value of this information; I do. And no, this isn’t a poke at Darren.) He was looking at quantity and couldn’t understand how anyone could build a site that earned money by posting all those short posts.

   And that’s the point: a blogger’s posts don’t have to be long and well thought out. They can be short, succinct ideas to share with others.

   Like your asides.

   What I’m suggesting here is that your asides are really just short blog posts — and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. No need for special formatting. (In fact, I find it rather distracting when I visit your site; looks fine in my feed reader,though.) No need to apologize for keeping them brief. No need to refer to them as brain farts.

   Hell, your brain fart asides are still more interesting to your site’s readers than lengthy posts by the majority of bloggers, many of whom aren’t doing much more than wasting bandwidth with their unimpressive and overly wordy fluff.

   (Hmmm…perhaps like me with this comment.)

   Just my two cents.

2. Tony Hung :
   August 6th, 2007 at 1:10 am | Permalink

   Hi Maria,

   Two things.

   First of all, in regards to your observations about Problogger, let me start off by saying that I know Darren, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him in person (twice), I’ve guest written for his blog, and I’d like to think of him as a friend.

   With all that out of the way, I know what you mean. Specifically with sites like Problogger which are topical blogs, its easy to start out with a lot of piss and vinegar — and furthermore, its *important* for the life of the blog to post really good posts.

   After its gotten large, as I suppose with any entity, its more and more tempting to not do larger, longer or more in depth posts.

   And that’s why I think that with larger blogs it makes sense, after a while, to bring in guest bloggers to bring in some fresh perspective, new energy and so on.

   Like me. :) There was one post I was particularly proud of, called “how to market your blog in 2007″. That was a good one.:)

   Anyway, back to your comment.

   Thanks for your kind words … I am still used to writing longer posts, although its interesting how the implementation of “asides” seem to be changing that.

   I do agree that succinct is important, and getting even more succinct is something that I do actually value. I haven’t done the proper math / metrics / unsability testing / guestimates with DJI, but I suspect that many people don’t read through verbose and wordy posts anyway … if the number of comments are any indication.

   It will be interesting to see how this blog evolves with “asides” implemented, though. ;)

   Cheers
   t @ dji