How My Blogging Style Changed Over the Years

Monday, February 9, 2009

: Image by …-Wink-… via Flickr

I started blogging back in 2006 as an effective way to give my two cents about what was happening around me in terms of technology, new services, VoIP, Web 2,0 and so on.

Month after month, I’ve been “accepted” by fellow bloggers covering the same topics and my readership slowly grew more and more.

After over two years, with an average of 1500 pageviews/day, almost 800 feed readers and after six or seven blog themes changed, I noticed that the way I blog now is way different from what I used to in the past. Here are five things I did in the past and that I’m not (mostly) doing anymore.

1) Short stories

There are a lot of short thoughts, comments, news that I’m not reporting in my blog anymore. Twitter or Facebook are slowly replacing those kind of blog posts. If I like a story read somewhere in another blog, for instance, I simply share it on Google Reader, sometimes with a note, then it goes straight to Twitter or/and becomes my new Facebook status as well.

2) Breaking news

I’m not a journalist, I’m a blogger. I never look for breaking news to write about and I don’t care if I’m not the first to tell a certain story. Sometimes, I write about a news read thousand times in my Google Reader feed just because I want to build a story around it and I try to look at the news from a different standpoint.

3) Fresh Content

I’m trying to write more fresh content than the past. Not just comments to other popular stories/bloggers about new products or services, but brand new fresh content. It takes more time, but it’s definitely worth it. The most read posts of my blog are those with fresh content (and usually longer posts) that are also more likely to be published on StumbleUpon or other similar services.

4) Press Releases pick up

In the past, I basically wrote a blog post about every news which came to me thanks to the activity of PR agencies. Today, I rarely pickup a story from PR guys and, often, if I like the news and find it interesting, I write about it weeks later. On the contrary, sometimes there could be some news which definitely catch my attention and, in that cases, I will blog about them immediately.

5) Referrers

In the past, I took a look at Technorati every day. I was eager to know if someone noticed my blog post and commented on it on their own blog. I look at this as an endorsement and I’m very proud of it. These days, instead, I’m not paying much attention to this anymore. In addition, great plugins like Zemanta make bloggers insert links to related stories at the bottom of their own posts, without the need of paying much attention to the contet. For me, those kind links are not valuable anymore and I prefer seeing people retweeting about my blog posts or commenting about it on my blog than reblogging.

What about you? Has the way your blog changed in the last years/months? Join this discussion by leaving a comment to this post or looking at Twitter and making motr popular.

How My Blogging Style Changed Over the Years

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