Search Results for: blogging

Blogging for the Long Tail

· Martin Kelley

One of the neat­est obser­va­tions to gain pop­u­lar­i­ty in the last few years is that of The Long Tail, first coined a few years ago by Wired mag­a­zine edi­tor Chris Ander­son (here’s the orig­i­nal arti­cle).
He noticed that the inter­net had opened up access to nich­es – that
search­es and nation­al dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works had giv­en new mar­kets to
obscure and small-market prod­ucts. The clas­sic exam­ple is Net­flix, the
direct-mail movie rental ser­vice, that has a huge cat­a­log of titles,
the great major­i­ty of which are so obscure that no local video rental
store could afford to car­ry them. But Net­flix actu­al­ly rents them all
and if you add all these low-volume rentals togeth­er you’ll find the
total vol­ume exceeds that sea­son’s blockbusters.

I
learned just how strong the long tail can be a few years ago when I
worked on Quak​erfind​er​.org, a meeting/church look-up ser­vice. For the
first year, the site got mod­er­ate traf­fic from search engines. Google
was­n’t able to index the actu­al church list­ings because users were
required to type towns and postal codes in to get results. The only
search engine vis­i­tors we got came in on very gener­ic phras­es like
“find quak­er meetings.” 

Sus­pect­ing
we were los­ing a large poten­tial audi­ence, I redesigned the site so
Google could index each and every meet­ing (adding a few tricks so each
list­ing trad­ed links with half-a-dozen oth­er list­ings). Once the change
was in effect (help from our pro­gram­mer), those old gener­ic search
phras­es were still the most pop­u­lar. But now we got small num­bers of
vis­its on thou­sands of terms which we had­n’t hit before: “Quak­ers
Pough­keep­sie” and “Quak­er Church­es in San Fran­cis­co,” etc. This was the
long tail in effect. Our vis­its jumped four­fold with­in a few months
(see chart). The long tail made us much more vis­i­ble. (More on the Googliza­tion effort in that year’s ana­lyt­ic report.)

A great new traf­fic analy­sis ser­vice is called Hit­Tail.
Like many oth­er pro­grams it tells you what search phras­es have brought
traf­fic to your site. But what’s cool is that it gives
sug­ges­tions – key­words it thinks will bring even more vis­i­tors in. Some
of the sug­ges­tions are fun­ny. For exam­ple, it thinks I should post
about “tra­di­tion­al sweat lodge songs,” “tick­lish armpits” and “how to
dress with per­son­al­i­ty” over on Quak­er Ranter.
But it also thinks I might con­sid­er post­ing on “small church local
out­reach ideas,” “new online mag­a­zines” and “chris­t­ian quakers.” 

If
all one was wor­ried about was sheer traf­fic vol­ume, then a post on each
key­word might be in order. But this would bring a lot of ran­dom traffic
and dilute any focus the blog might have (I already get a lot of
traf­fic on a par­tic­u­lar non-typical post that I wrote part­ly as an SEO exper­i­ment).
My guess is you should go through the Hit­Tail sug­ges­tions list to find
top­ics that match your site’s focus but do so in lan­guage that you
might not nor­mal­ly use.

I might try some exper­i­men­tal posts on
my per­son­al blog soon. I’ll def­i­nite­ly report back about them here on
the Mar​tinKel​ley​.com design blog. In the mean­time, check out Hit­Tail’s blog, which has some good links.

On job hunting and the blogging future in Metro Philadelphia

· Martin Kelley

I’ve been qui­et on the blogs late­ly, focus­ing on job search­es rather than rant­i­ng. I thought I’d take a lit­tle time off to talk about my lit­tle cor­ner of the career mar­ket. I’ve been apply­ing for a lot of web design and edit­ing jobs but the most inter­est­ing ones have com­bined these togeth­er in cre­ative ways. My qual­i­fi­ca­tions for these jobs are more the inde­pen­dent sites I’ve put togeth­er — notably Quak​erQuak​er​.org—than my paid work for Friends.

For exam­ple: one inter­est­ing job gets repost­ed every few weeks on Craigslist. It’s geared toward adding next-generation inter­ac­tive con­tent to the web­site of a con­sor­tium of sub­ur­ban news­pa­pers (appli­cants are asked to be “com­fort­able with terms like blog, vlog, CSS, YourHub, MySpace, YouTube…,” etc.). The qual­i­fi­ca­tions and vision are right up my alley but I’m still wait­ing to hear any­thing about the appli­ca­tion I sent by email and snail mail a week ago. Despite this, they’re con­tin­u­ing to post revised descrip­tions to Craigslist. Yes­ter­day’s ver­sion dropped the “con­ver­gence” lin­go and also dropped the pro­ject­ed salary by about ten grand.

About two months ago I actu­al­ly got through to an inter­view for a fab­u­lous job that con­sist­ed of putting togeth­er a blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty site to fea­ture the lesser-known and quirky busi­ness­es of Philadel­phia. I had a great inter­view, thought I had a good chance at the job and then heard noth­ing. Days turned to weeks as my follow-up com­mu­ni­ca­tions went unan­swered. 11/30 Update: a friend just guessed the group I was talk­ing about and emailed that the site did launch, just qui­et­ly. It looks good.

Cor­po­rate blog­ging is said to be the wave of the future and in only a few years polit­i­cal cam­paigns have come to con­sid­er blog­gers as an essen­tial tool in get­ting their mes­sage out. User-generated con­tent has become essen­tial feed­back and pub­lic­i­ty mech­a­nisms. My expe­ri­ence from the Quak­er world is that blog­gers are con­sti­tut­ing a new kind of lead­er­ship, one that’s both more out­go­ing but also thought­ful and vision­ary (I should post about this some­time soon). Blogs encour­age open­ness and trans­paren­cy and will sure­ly affect orga­ni­za­tion­al pol­i­tics more and more in the near future. Smart com­pa­nies and non­prof­its that want to grow in size and influ­ence will have to learn to play well with blogs.

But the future is lit­tle suc­cor to the present. In the Philadel­phia met­ro­pol­i­tan area it seems that the rare employ­er that’s think­ing in these terms have have a lot of back and forths try­ing to work out the job descrip­tion. Well, I only need one enlight­ened employ­er! It’s time now to put the boys to bed, then check the job boards again. Keep us in your prayers.

The Early Blogging Days

· Martin Kelley

I start­ed Non​vi​o​lence​.org in late 1995 as a place to pub­li­cize the work of the US peace move­ment which was not get­ting out to a wide (or a young) audi­ence. I built and main­tained the web­sites of a few dozen host­ed groups (includ­ing the War Resisters League, Fel­low­ship of Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and Pax Christi USA) but I quick­ly real­ized that the Non​vi​o​lence​.org home­page itself could be used for more than just as a place to put links to mem­ber groups. I could use it to high­light the arti­cles I thought should get more pub­lic­i­ty, whether on or off the Non​vi​o​lence​.org domain.

The home­page adapt­ed into what is now a rec­og­niz­able blog for­mat on Novem­ber 13, 1997 when I re-named the home­page “Non­vi­o­lence Web Upfront” and start­ed post­ing links to inter­est­ing arti­cles from Non​vi​o​lence​.org mem­ber groups. In response to a com­ment the oth­er day I won­dered how that fit in with the evo­lu­tion of blog­ging. I was shocked to learn from Wikipedi­a’s that the term “weblog” was­n’t coined until Decem­ber of that year. I think is less a coin­ci­dence than a con­fir­ma­tion that many of us were try­ing to fig­ure out a for­mat for shar­ing the web with others.

The ear­li­est edi­tion stored on Archive​.org is from Decem­ber 4, 1997. It focused on the hun­dredth anniver­sary of the birth of Catholic Work­er co-founder Dorothy Day. To give you an sense of the ear­ly independently-published arti­cles, the Jan­u­ary 2, 1998 edi­tion includ­ed a guest piece by John Steitz, “Is the Non­vi­o­lence Web a Move­ment Half-Way House” that sounds eeri­ly sim­i­lar to recent dis­cus­sions on Quak­er Ranter.

Below is an excerpt from the email announce­ment for “Non­vi­o­lence Web Upfront” (typ­i­cal­ly for me, I sent it out after I had been run­ning the new for­mat for awhile):

NONVIOLENCE WEB NEWS, by Mar­tin Kel­ley Week of Decem­ber 29, 1997

CONTENTS

Intro­duc­ing “Non­vi­o­lence Web Upfront”

New Pro­ce­dures
New Web­site #1: SERPAJ
New Web­site #2: Stop the Cassi­ni Fly­by
Two Awards
Num­bers Avail­able Upon Request
Week­ly Vis­i­tor Counts

With my trav­el­ling and hol­i­day sched­ule, it’s been hard to keep reg­u­lar NVWeb News updates com­ing along, but it’s been a great month and there’s a lot. I’m espe­cial­ly proud of the con­tin­u­ing evo­lu­tion of what I’m now call­ing “Non­vi­o­lence Web Upfront,” seen by 1800 – 2200 peo­ple a month!

INTRODUCING “NONVIOLENCE WEB UPFRONT”

The new mag­a­zine for­mat of the NVWe­b’s home­page has been need­ing a name. It need­ed to men­tioned the “Non­vi­o­lence Web” and I want­ed it to imply that it was the site’s home­page (some­times referred to as a “front­page”) and that it con­tained mate­r­i­al tak­en from the sites of the NVWeb.

So the name is “Non­vi­o­lence Web Upfront” and a trip to http://​www​.non​vi​o​lence​.org will see that spelled out big on top of the weekly-updated articles.

There’s also an archive of the week­ly install­ments found at the bot­tom of NVWeb Upfront. It’s quite a good col­lec­tion already!

Now that this is mov­ing for­ward, I encour­age every­one to think about how they might con­tribute arti­cles. If you write an inter­est­ing opin­ion piece, essay, or sto­ry that you think would fit, send it along to me. For exam­ple, “War Toys: Re-Action-ist Fig­ures” FOR’s Vin­cent Romano’s piece from the Nov. 27 edi­tion, was an essay he had already writ­ten and made a good com­pli­men­ta­ry piece for the Youth­Peace Week spe­cial. But don’t wor­ry about themes: NVWeb Upfront is meant not only to be time­ly but to show the breadth of the non­vi­o­lence move­ment, so send your pieces along!

Public Friends

· Martin Kelley

Windy Cool­er has a new arti­cle on the Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence web­site, What is a Quak­er Pub­lic Min­is­ter? Windy’s been research­ing the con­cept of pub­lic Friends this year, inter­view­ing peo­ple about their under­stand­ing and experiences. 

The star­tling lack of sup­port for many pub­lic min­is­ters as agents of cre­ativ­i­ty and growth is part­ly because many Friends are unfa­mil­iar with the term “pub­lic min­is­ter” and uncer­tain how to sup­port their work. Addi­tion­al­ly, a mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the tes­ti­mo­ny of equal­i­ty, which often leads comfort-seeking elders to crit­i­cize or “cut down” those who stand out among us (referred to as the “tall pop­pies” by Mar­ty Grundy in her 1999 Pen­dle Hill pam­phlet of the same name), caus­es many Friends attempt­ing pub­lic min­istry to encounter hos­til­i­ty or apa­thy in their local meet­ings. Even in cas­es where a faith and prac­tice doc­u­ment out­lines the prac­tice, it remains large­ly taboo in lib­er­al Quak­erism to seek a minute acknowl­edg­ing the gifts of min­istry, much less more sub­stan­tial support.

Windy inter­viewed me as part of her research. If “pub­lic Friend” means some­one who is vis­i­bly tak­ing on a teach­ing role for Friends, then I’ve been one since my mid-20s when I start­ed putting togeth­er mail­ing lists and web­sites orga­niz­ing young adult Friends (YAFs in Quak­er speak); this even­tu­al­ly branched out into blog­ging, host­ing a social net­work, lead­ing work­shops, and giv­ing talks now and then. The longe­tiv­i­ty gives it a cer­tain author­i­ty, I sup­pose, as have my pro­fes­sion­al roles with Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions (though of course on my blog I’m only speak­ing for myself).

But this belies just how inde­pen­dent, dare I say ranter­ish, this process has been. I know how pub­lic min­istry should work, but it has­n’t ever worked out that way for me. Even now, I don’t have a spe­cial des­ig­na­tion or sup­port for my vol­un­teer Quak­er work. 

I should note that I once had a brush with insti­tu­tion­al legit­i­ma­cy. When I applied for a grant from the Clarence and Lil­ly Pick­ett Endow­ment for Quak­er Lead­er­ship, they required a sup­port let­ter from my meet­ing and Atlantic City Area Meet­ing pro­vid­ed me with one. It was­n’t a record­ing minute, per se, and did­n’t come with any fol­lowup sup­port but it was some­thing. The Pick­ett fund specif­i­cal­ly sup­port­ed younger Friends. It’s a small world so I know a lot of oth­er recip­i­ents and many had inter­est­ing sto­ries about going their meet­ings for sup­port let­ters. In ret­ro­spect, forc­ing a gen­er­a­tion of twenty-something active Quak­ers to get these let­ters might have been the Pick­ett fund’s most impor­tant lega­cy (it closed down in 2019).

Full dis­clo­sure and mea cul­pa to say that I’ve nev­er asked for for­mal meet­ing sup­port. I have a ten­den­cy to land at small, min­i­mal­ly orga­nized meet­ings that don’t have any expe­ri­ences of sup­port­ing min­istries. It always felt like it’d be too much of a push to ask an over­bur­dened small group to take on one more responsibility.

I know some larg­er Quak­er meet­ings have more for­mal sup­port struc­tures in place, with clear­ness and sup­port (some­times now called anchor) com­mit­tees sup­port­ing their pub­lic Friends. I’m a bit jeal­ous but also have been told by Friends in these posi­tions that they some­times still feel some­what rogueish and alone. Of course maybe this is just how it is. Did peo­ple like John Wool­man and Joshua Evans real­ly feel ful­ly sup­port­ed by their meet­ings as they trav­eled about? And did they have now-forgotten con­tem­po­raries who felt the “tall pop­pies” effect and elect­ed to stay home? Ben­jamin Lay comes to mind as some­one who had to min­is­ter with­out sup­port. Windy writes:

While it’s true that many of our famous his­toric pub­lic min­is­ters were dis­liked in their time and praised in ours as if they rep­re­sent our own actions, it is incon­ceiv­able that these lead­ers could have trav­eled, spo­ken, and effect­ed change in their quest for right rela­tion­ship with­out robust sup­port. It is some­thing of a mir­a­cle then that so many dynam­ic Friends today are attempt­ing to do just that out of love for who we are and can be and we are tread­ing water with all the faith in the world that the under­tow of the sta­tus quo will not over­come us.

FGC promis­es this to be the “first of four short essays in a series on pub­lic min­istry in the lib­er­al tra­di­tion.” Glad to see FGC explor­ing this work. In the ear­ly 2000s they did impor­tant work with the Trav­el­ing Min­istries Com­mit­tee1, which did a lot to re-legitimate the idea of min­istry among Lib­er­al Friends. Windy also gives a shout-out to the he Quak­er Lead­er­ship Cen­ter, which I know is doing good work around these ques­tions too.

What is a Quak­er Pub­lic Minister?

Oooh!, a Quaker zine

· Martin Kelley

Wess Daniels got a pack of Quak­er zines in the mail. That’s right, phys­i­cal paper:

A few weeks back, I got some mail from some­one I didn’t know. As I opened it, these cute lit­tle book­lets fell out, and a let­ter addressed to me: Hel­lo, Mr. Daniels. The let­ter writer, Pacif­ic North­west Quak­er Natal­ie Ram­s­land, told me a lit­tle about how she came into zine mak­ing and why she was send­ing me some of her zines.

Wess’s pho­to of the “Fold in the Light” zine (source)

That’s very cool! I zined back in col­lege: “The Vac­u­um” ran every Fri­day for most of two years. When I was doing a non­vi­o­lence web­site in the mid-90s it seemed nat­ur­al to apply this mod­el and I acci­den­tal­ly start­ed blog­ging, com­plete with mir­ror­ing it to an email list (I wrote “Fif­teen Years of Blog­ging” eleven years ago, whoa!). Now my blog auto­mat­i­cal­ly goes out by email on Fri­days. There’s such an obvi­ous through-line between the 90s zine and my ongo­ing blog­ging (and obvi­ous­ly we have week­ly con­tent cycles for Friends Jour­nal too).

I love the idea of paper zines com­ing back though their lim­it has always been that the best dis­tri­b­u­tion is local and miss­es those of us out of the geo­graph­ic loop.

Zine-makerNatalie also has a Sub­stack, which I’ll be read­ing eagerly.

25 years

· Martin Kelley

How did I miss that last month was the 25th anniver­sary of my first blog­ging effort? Non­vi­o­lence Web Upfront had a half-dozen posts a week and was tied to an email newslet­ter that went out every Fri­day (that’s pret­ty much the same for­mat as Quak­er Ranter in 2022!). This was before Dreamweaver, Blog­ger, Mov­able Type, Word­Press, etc. The word weblog was a few weeks from being coined. 

I put this all togeth­er using an absolute­ly ridicu­lous Microsoft Word macro that I had adapt­ed. I’d write a post in Word then hit a but­ton. A long string of search and replaces would start to run. For exam­ple, one search would look for bold­est text and put “<b>” and “</b>” around it. After half a minute or so it’d spit out an HTML file to my desk­top. I’d open an FTP pro­gram and upload the file to the serv­er. If I had an edit to make I’d have to go through the macro all over again. I was teach­ing myself HTML as I went along and it’s amaz­ing any of it dis­played properly. 

Still, it’s remark­able that while so much of back end has changed and changed again over the decades, the final for­mat is instant­ly rec­og­niz­able as a blog. The Quak­er Ranter archives now list over 1,300 articles.

The Early Blogging Days
The Ear­ly Blog­ging Days 

I start­ed Non​vi​o​lence​.org in late 1995 as a place to pub­li­cize the work of the US peace movement…
Quaker Ranter Quak­er Ranter 

Everything’s a blog

· Martin Kelley

Appar­ent­ly it’s that time of year again. The days grow short­er, the nights grow chill­i­er, and we bemoan the death of blogging.

As some­one who’s now well into my third decade of blog­ging, It’s fun­ny read­ing the respons­es. Peo­ple are talk­ing about mar­kets or about how it’s not the same since big mon­ey stopped sub­si­diz­ing the blog­ging infrastructure.

When blogs start­ed they were incred­i­bly under the radar. We didn’t have big audi­ences — didn’t real­ly expect them — and we weren’t try­ing to mon­e­tize or brand our­selves. We were telling sto­ries. They were text, they were pic­tures, some­times they were videos and audio. For my first few years of blog­ging I resist­ed even call­ing it that because the term was so asso­ci­at­ed with a kind of self-focused hot take.

Accord­ing to one recent sur­vey, Word­Press is pow­er­ing 34% of the pub­lic inter­net. That’s not bad for a dead medi­um. If any­thing is RIP, it’s a nar­row def­i­n­i­tion of blog­ging. I’d argue that any cre­ative con­tent that is reg­u­lar­ly post­ed and dis­played in a time­line is a kind of blog. When I start­ed blog­ging in 1997, I was hand cod­ing every­thing. But now there’s a gazil­lion ser­vices that all look and feel dif­fer­ent but have a dis­tinct blog­ging DNA.

Peo­ple use Face­book to blog. When peo­ple unroll a Twit­ter for Thread Read­er App, it shows just how blog­gy Twit­ter is. Reddit’s the com­ment sec­tion of a blog large­ly divorced from a blog. Instagram’s noth­ing more than a pho­to­blog. Pod­casts are large­ly orga­nized as blogs. Mailchimp and Sub­stack are blogs tied to email lists. And of course there’s Tum­blr, Word­Press, Medi­um, and oth­er more clas­sic text-based blogs. Nowa­days the con­cept is so diverse and dif­fuse that it’s become invis­i­ble. The impor­tant thing is that peo­ple have a voice that they can share.