Maybe it’s the way the web works. People don’t have time to read anymore. Everyone is too busy digesting information in 140 characters.
Of late, I’ve definitely noticed a trend towards the easy way out – fluffy content, and worst of all I’ve been guilty of doing it myself. It’s far too easy to collect useful links on your travels, and offer them up to others for maximum coverage. The content after all isn’t yours, and the hard work is (mostly) already done. All the blogger has to do is spot a good from a bad link.
I’ve seen it across the blogging community, people chasing peaks, building the content (they think others want to see) and ultimately selling out. If I was to make one recommendation today as a tech blogger, reading that link would be it. It has most definitely sobered me, after over indulging on writing those sort of posts here.
Now, I’m not saying that writing (creating?) list based / linkbait posts doesn’t have it’s place in attracting attention, and it can build a lot of traffic in a short space of time, and can help get a site off the ground. But it doesn’t stick, it doesn’t build trust or authority and as the article states, it doesn’t build longevity of traffic.
Worst of all, it exposes non of your personality, and none of your writing skills. Which is what blogging is all about is it not?
So I’m cutting back, tackling the addiction head on, and hopefully becoming a better blogger for it.
linky
posted:January 29, 2009 9:17 am
I’m getting tired generally of articles in blogs with titles like “57 JQuery Image Zooms” etc. Rather than just sticking up every link they can find I would rather that authors exercised a bit of quality control and picked out their top 5 or 10 whatevers and wrote about them.
I see article titles like “90+ productivity links …” and just move on because I don’t have time to look at 90 links.
Dean