A brave new world
Today is the day. The first day of the rest of my (research) life. I am officially conducting research on blogging community motivations and behaviours through this blog. As part of my renewed commitment to the blog (yeah I have been pretty bad about blogging lately) I am pledging to blog at least 5 times per week – sort of a New Year’s Resolution that I plan to keep for more than 1 day.
So the blog for today is really about experimenting with engaging readers, so I thought I would try the new PollDaddy feature that was mentioned in another blog I read (see Impressions Scholarcast). Let me know how you like it.
Categories: General
blogging research, polls
Fa – I think it’s also worth exploring what happens when you don’t feel like blogging – it’s easy to let days slip by and not blog because “life” is more appealing. Yet there are some bloggers that appear to blog blog blog and not do that – so what’s different? Do you feel guilty of you don’t post? Why? It’s just an online diary – would you feel guilty if you didn’t write in your little pink book with the lock on the side? Is it because people are reading? But are they? I just got to thinking on this after your “10 day” and “son of 10 day” – about the difference between those who always blog, those who occasionally blog and feel fine and those who intermittently blog and feel bad.
That’s a really good point, Melanie. I have tried a couple times since I was a teen to keep a paper diary and none of those attempts went well. I always started off with the best of intentions and then there would come a time when I didn’t feel like it (I didn’t ~need~ it really) and it would fall off and then stop.
Of course those attempts were just for me and this does feel slightly different. I feel a little like the blog starts a convo and when I don’t blog it is like I have just walked away mid-sentence. Now maybe readers don’t notice because they come and go at a different speed than I do as the author. But I do fear that if dialogue slows down too much, at some point readers will stop coming back and I’ll have to re-establish the relationships all over again.
However, I could just be insecure, paranoid, or completely misinterpreting blog reader behaviour. Because I read heaps of blogs and I don’t lose faith in them if they take some time (months) off from blogging. You know who you are – Grin
Here’s the problem with polls… if someone hates polls and prefers narrative, will they even respond to the poll? Will the poll’s data be skewed in favor of those who like polls? Just for the record, I responded.