inter:digital strategies

In the last month, I’ve made a total of four posts to this blog. From that list of posts, only one has been of any real substance. The fact is (to keep things simple): I haven’t really had the time to dedicate to this blog. I’m considering shutting it down.

All posts would continue to be available; I’d simply absorb this blog into my web development blog. I’d do all the appropriate redirects to keep the resource available - but I’d be maintaining one fewer sites.
Life would be simpler.

I haven’t decided for certain yet - but I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.

Running a search marketing consulting company is not actually in my best interest. As a web developer, the majority of my clients actually are search marketing consultants. Does it make sense for me to run a business which competes with my clients? Not really. Especially when I really enjoy the development aspect more.

I still intend to write on search marketing — I think there are a lot of important issues where search marketing, usability, and accessibility intersect and I fully intend to explore those issues. When writing such cross-topic posts, however, I’ve been hindered by choosing where to publish them! I’d rather make that a bit simpler for myself, and send everything to one place.

Anybody who has an opinion on this subject, please do chime in!

The big movement in web communities recently, or so says Time Magazine, has been user generated content. Whether it’s YouTube’s video extravaganza, blogging, or photo sharing from Flickr, the goal has been sharing information about yourself. But user generated content has an elder sibling which I have to confess to finding a bit more interesting — community created content. Forums have a long history of creating complex content through the interactions and information sharing behaviors of their members.

MyBlogLog has created a recent stir in the blogging communities by providing an easy way to connect bloggers with their own communities - essentially creating a community of blogs. This expansion of the two-way blogger/commenter relationship into a more three-dimensional interaction has a lot of potential. Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) recently wrote (in a comment):

This is a good example of the benefits of a blog community - not only can blog readers find out about me and my interests, but I have a way of finding out more about my blog readers. And, as I’ve found in this case, readers who are interested in what I am blogging about might themselves blog on topics which interest me.

Not every reader of your blog will comment. Not every reader will have a MyBlogLog account. However, the interesting combination of readers and fellow bloggers creates a unique collaboration. Rather than having pure statistics - knowing you’ve been visited by 48 people, 65 percent of whom used Internet Explorer and so on, you have a small insertion of real human data in your statistics. MyBlogLog can tell you that this person actually visited your blog and that person admires you enough to have added you to their contacts.

Really, it’s pretty cool.

Statistics are addicting, if you know how to read them. And Feedburner has very kindly recently released their own free statistics package for blogs. Thus, Feedburner is addicting — right?

At any rate, I’ve just implemented these statistics, and I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of information I learn about this site.

I know one thing: I’ll get better statistics if I write more articles. Recently has not been my most heavy writing period…