Foreign Perspectives

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Thanks to the Times it seems that bloggers no longer have the priviledge of anonymity. To be fair in the case of Nightjack the police who he worked for were closing in on him and would probably have worked out who he was fairly soon even without the aid of the Times.

However, now that the Times have removed the anonymity for bloggers, perhaps it is time that the same cloak of anonymity was removed from newspapers too? After all why should the foreign correspondent who wished to remain anonymous be allowed to do so by the Asia Times (no relation to the London Times as far as I know)? Sure, chances are the Chinese would have thrown them out of the country or perhaps something a little less subtle, but after all if Justice Eady can “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity” how much more so does that apply in the case of newspapers? Can we take it as read that the practice of having anonymous columnists will be ended forthwith?

Now, I’ll grant that there were special circumstances in the case of Nightjack in that Richard’s blog was a little too real and appears to have compromised some cases that he talked about but that’s a separate issue. The key think is that Justice Eady’s comments are way too far reaching. Taken to their ultimate conclusion and you could easily see the end of criticism in totalitarian states which, thanks to blogging, was finally finding a voice of sorts where previously it had none. The situation of newspapers is no different: why should their sources be protected any differently? After all, they’re talking to a news outlet so why should they have any expectation of anonymity?

Why should newspapers be allowed the protection of anonymity when bloggers have lost it?

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Much as we might laugh at the Trabants that East Germany used to turn out as being unreliable and prone to break down, sadly that’s what many blogs seem to look like these days.

Oh, they don’t break down, but the quality of the workmanship that you see in some of the posts is really deplorable. What’s perhaps worse is that a lot of those low quality blogs are taking sponsored posts and if anything the quality of the posts that they get paid for is even worse than the norm for them.

Why do the advertisers put up with it? OK, they might just want the link from the blog but do they really want their product to be associated with shoddy workmanship? After all, the authors of these posts are numbered amongst their suppliers ultimately. Surely they can’t be so uncritical to accept what are often very shoddy posts indeed?

How bad are they? How about “you must visit this site. i think there products are really great. visit this site they have great products.”? I’ve paraphrased the real example so you can’t search for the actual blog entry that was based on (which was worse than that).

Good quality writing doesn’t mean that it can’t be about trashy subjects. Whilst many would call The Sun a trashy paper, every one of their articles is well written. Sure the writing style is laid back but it suits the content just as the relatively dense writing style of The Times suits it’s content and readership.

Just as there’s a range of writing styles in newspapers, so too one would expect there to be a range of writing styles in blogs. That doesn’t mean that the spelling, grammar and repetitiveness of my example is acceptable though because it isn’t and especially so since the advertiser paid $50 for it (quite why they approved payment is beyond me).

I’m not saying that you need perfection from day one but you should at least aim for that.

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The number of hits that myself and Wendy have been picking up on our main blogs has gone up quite dramatically over the last month or two and, ideally, we’d like to know why that is but, of course, the problem is that we’ve not just done one thing with the blogs over that time.

First off, we moved the blogs from a UK based host to one based in America. Since both blogs are targeted at a UK market (if one could call a 40/30 traffic split targeting) one would have expected that this would reduce the number of hits thanks to the geo-targeting that the search engines get up to. Having said that when I say we target the blogs what’s actually happening is that we’re writing in British English rather than American English and we’re writing about topics that arise in the UK rather than those that arise in the US. That said, the differences in British and American English are so small and so little used within the blogs (I’ve not used one word so far in this post that is in country-specific English) that I can’t see it affecting the search engine hits to any substantial degree. Also, many of the topics that we write about are international in scope which presumably explains the almost equal split between British and American readers. Thus, on balance, the change in ISP shouldn’t have made a difference.

Next, we changed how the titles come out on the blogs. Previously they would have been listed as, for example, “Foreign Perspectives » Blog Archive » Title of the post” whereas now they come out as “Title of the post | Foreign Perspectives”. Now on a really top ranking blog it might well be to the advantage of the blog to have the blog name coming first but Foreign Perspectives isn’t, yet, in the top ranks of the blogging world so perhaps it’s best to have the post title coming first? I suspect that’s contributed to the rise but I don’t know how great the contribution has been.

Then we thought we’d have a go at promoting the blogs on social networking sites. You might think that this would have a very large and noticeable effect but whilst it is noticeable in the stats it’s not, usually, that large. Some posts do pick up a bit of a following in Twitter but most don’t. I suspect that I could work on this is a promising area to develop but I’ve not done so as yet. The other social networking sites rarely pick up on the posts or at least people reading it elsewhere aren’t clicking on the link to the post. So chalk up some rise to this one.

Finally, we compared note as regards topics we were writing about. In my case I’ve written a little more stuff in the entertainment category and that’s certainly had a bit of an impact on hits but, again, not an overly substantial one.

So overall, there are a couple of things that would seem to be contributing to a rise in readership but none that seem to be sufficient to produce the doubling of hits that we’ve noticed over recent months.

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