Of course I’m not telling you everything I do.

Posted by stuart as ,

I’m a bit late on this one (as usual), but I thought I’d add my two cents worth on Mark’s post about us all competing against each other to turn a buck online, and whether we give away too much or too little in our blogs as a result.

I wrote the other day that I read blogs to be informed and entertained. Now the level of entertainment is a subjective measure, but the bit about being informed intrigues me.

When I buy a book about how to do something, I don’t expect the author to hold back his little secrets, I want the whole story, unabridged. I guess I can expect this because I’ve paid out cold hard Benjamins for the book, and I’d be pretty pissed if I felt that the author was holding back. This theory falls flat on its ass in the blogging world, as blogs are a “take it or leave it” proposition. You can hang around and read the content if you like it, or piss off and do something more constructive with your time if you don’t.

It’s interesting to look at the idea of withholding information in the context of the famed Google Search Algorythm. How is it that a disgruntled ex-Google employee hasn’t spilled the beans on the algorythm? Simple - noone knows the algorythm in full. Different people know different bits, which make up the whole. Blogging is similar. If you’re prepared to put in the time reading and researching, you’re going to find all the information you need. Just don’t expect to get it all from the one source.
So how much do we give away in our blogs? I reckon there are two ways we can give out useful and informative information in our blog without giving too much away:

1. Give an overview of our projects without going into too much detail about the specifics or mechanics of what we’re doing (I’ll call this macro-blogging), or;
2. Giving details of the specifics of what we’re doing, ie the code, the keyword research etc, without putting them in the larger context of the project they’re being used on. (Let’s call this micro-blogging)

So which is better?

It depends.

A quick look through my Firefox bookmarks (as opposed to my feedreader) tells me I’m a fan of the micro-bloggers. All my bookmarks point to code snippets and interesting tools such as keyword researchers etc. I’m not such a fan of the Probloggers and such (although I do read Darren, and enjoy his writing), as pretty much everything on that blog can be worked out yourself if you’re prepared to put your thinking hat on.

Those of you who read here on a regular basis will know that I’m dipping my toe into the murky waters of PHP scripting. When it comes to writing a script, my theory goes like this:

1. What do I want it to do?
2. How will it do this?
3. Where can I find the code snippets to glue together to get the job done
4. Where did I go wrong and why doesn’t the furking thing work
5. Tinker
6. Shit! I did it, it works!

This means that the blogs I’m interested in are the ones which tell me about specific things. I don’t care about the context in which those things are posted, I just want the raw information so that I can apply it to my wants and desires.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy the macro-bloggers. I do. It’s just that I’m an ideas sort of bloke, and don’t need help coming up with ideas and such, I just want to know how to implement the ideas I have.