Observed

Technorati has a pretty good idea why we blog. Since 2002, the blog search engine has been tracking millions of blogs and social media worldwide.

I plan to have a big birthday May 12th.  (As a public service, here’s my Amazon Wish List.)  So, I identify with the blogging impulse identified by Kevin O’Keefe in his Why bother with a law blog? post yesterday.

For an answer, Kevin turned to Bill Gates (son of a prominent lawyer) and others.  He heard that at least some of us blog in order to leave a legacy.  In other words, it’s recognition that life is short and the written word is long.

No doubt.  A sense of mortality explains a lot of the choices we’ve been making every day for centuries…from child rearing to cave paintings and a lot in between.

If, however, you care to really know why people blog, ask Technorati.  It’s the preeminent blog search engine, tracking and analyzing blogs since its launch in 2002.  In 2008, it claimed to be following 112 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media worldwide.

Technorati’s go-to State of the Blogosphere reports that expressing a personal passion (such as a hobby) ranks high in explaining the urge to blog. So does seeking a connection with others — particularly if others are like-minded.  Conversely, making money is toward the bottom of the list.

On the other hand, a lot of us apparently blog to advance careers or to gain professional recognition.

So, Kevin’s right.  Leaving a legacy is part of the answer.  Maybe a big reason why we blog.

My sense, however, is that we all blog for different reasons.  Or, different shades of one or two big, virtually universal reasons.

Because after all, we never get any better than human.  Whether we blog or not.

Take a look at Seth’s post from this morning.  Tell me if you agree that vendors and clients live in the binary world Seth seems to describe — where we either use our power to choose or we don’t.

Or, as Seth puts it, we abdicate.

So many things are now completely up to us, more than ever before. Where and how and when we work and invest and interact and instruct and learn…

If you think you have no choice but to do what you do now, you’ve already made a serious error.

It seems to me that passing the buck on this merely because it’s easier than choosing is precisely the wrong strategy. It enables an abdication of power that will be very hard to reverse. It’s up to you, and that’s part of the power that you’ve got.

I get that I have the power to choose.  I also understand that my clients have the same power, authority and ability to choose that I have.

In the best, most satisfying relationships, however, I’ve found that my clients and I share.

I typically, for example, offer my clients options.  I might say, Would you like me to make some recommendations?  Or, perhaps, I might even ask, Would you like for me to choose?

They might say no.  They might say yes.  Whatever they say at any given moment, it’s part of a conversation that reflects the respect we have for ourselves and for one another.

And one that reflects the need to be willing and open to the possibilities of collaboration.

Take a look at this infographic from Brafton’s Katherine Griwert.  It makes a compelling case for the importance of quality content to drive organic traffic.

The trick is in defining quality.  Google’s Amit Singhal and other experts aren’t quite as clear on this point, except to say that the search engines are looking for sites that create a “positive user experience” and that the path to that is through quality content.

In a nutshell, that means copy that’s engaging and that gets to the point.

What I offer my Web content clients is that search engines like the same things that people tend to like.  So…

• Keep things short.  250 words is plenty long for anything you might call a page.
• Use bullets, paragraph breaks, bold type and other formatting tools to break up your text.  If it looks long, it won’t get read…much less remembered.
• Headlines and subheads are huge.  Think of them as if they’re billboards…and your readers are moving 80 miles per hour.
• Tell your story.  Readers come to a professional service provider sites to find someone who a) can fix their problem, b) make their lives easier and c) clients will like working with.  Consider deploying brief client success stories, what you do other than work and the like.
• Face the client.  Make your copy about your client whenever possible and NOT all about you.  Not only is client-centric content more engaging, but it will set you way apart from your competition.

See?

PS:  A tip of the hat to Larry Bodine for posting this story.

A tech novelties article caught my eye the other day.  I found Anne Eisenberg’s coverage of on-line dictionaries (think Worknik) fascinating for how it reminded me of the humanness of language.

(It also hit me that the editors of The New York Times placed an article about words on the Business page.  Yeah, I know, it was really a tech piece.  It also underscored — in my mind, at least — the importance of good writing to good business.  Just saying.)

I noticed the tension between Web purists like Wordnik’s founder, Erin McKean, and Old Schoolers who admonish writers not to lean too far into the Internet.

Example?  Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, likes Wordnik’s oceans of words and word associations.  On the other hand, Nunberg says,

“The idea that you can pull lexicographers out of the loop and have an algorithm to mediate between me and the English language is goofy.

“Without hand citations done by trained people, you get a mess.”

Then again, Wordnik (launched in June 2009) has raised almost $13 million in VC so far and has business partners on the hook.  Somebody’s leaning.