The State of the Blog

There were a grand total of sixty-nine new posts last month. To understand why this is a significant fact, consider that there were only sixty-four posts in the entire year of 2006. To be sure, 2006 was the least productive year for Unstructured Musings but even the best year, 2005, only have a total of one hundred and forty-seven posts. The reason for this proliferation of posts is that I've made some deep changes in the methodology and philosophy behind the blog.

Before I explain the changes that I've made, and the reasons behind them, I'd like to explain a bit about how I make content. There are two major categories of blog content: derived and original.

Derived content, as the name implies, is content which is derived from other sources. In the simplest case, it's simply a post pointing to some other content with a short blurb attached to it ("Check out this site!"). The advantage of derived content is that it's fairly easy to produce.

The problem with derived content, however, is that there's always the possibility that you'll have already seen it. Any day you come here and there's nothing interesting for you to see is a reason for you not to come back, so any time I put up something you've found on your own, there is the potential that I've driving you away. In order to minimize that possibility, I need to go out of my way to find content that you probably haven't seen before, which means, among other things, that I need to avoid so-called viral content (which is content that rapidly spreads by way of word of mouth). So things like the Dramatic Chipmunk videos are something I need to avoid. This is something of a paradox, though, because viral content is viral precisely because people like it, which means that I'm deliberately avoiding the very things that are most interesting on the web, which means that I need to expend some thought and effort in order to find things that I think you'd enjoy.

One thing that I can do so increase your interest in derived content is by trying to add value to it. A good example of this is something I call a mosaic post which is a post where I tie together several different pointers with a theme. The recent Elven Tattoo post is a good example of that since it has links to cool Elven tattoos, another link to how to translate your name into Elven, a third link to how to write in Elven, a link to some software (along with a font link), a link discussing dialects of Elven, and finally a link to an Elven wedding invitation. This method provides you a kind of one-stop shop for cool content. Unfortunately, mosaic posts have their own drawback which is that they take me a fair amount of time and energy to put together which goes a long way towards negating the main reason to post derived content.

Original content is just that: content that I create, more or less, from scratch. Although it is possible to create a blog with such a niche theme, using derived content, that it's stands apart, most blogs (including this one) rely on original content to distinguish themselves from other blogs. Original content can take many forms from simple journal posts and poems all the way up to full blown essays and stories. Naturally, the longer and more complex the original content, the more effort it takes to create it.

When I created Unstructured Musings, blogs were just starting to go mainstream. As a consequence, I really didn't have a good template for what a blog should be. Most of the blogs at that time were basically online diaries. An online diary can be interesting is the author has a sufficiently interesting life. If I spent my days travelling to exotic locales, or if I had just won the lottery, it's entirely possible that people would be interested in knowing what was going on with my life on a day to day basis. The majority of people, however, live lives that are really only interesting to them and their inner circle of friends and family. Given that my days mostly revolve around work and reading, I knew that this wasn't what I wanted my blog to be about. I decided that the primary focus of the blog was going to be essays. My goal was to write an essay a week on any topic that I desired (hence the "unstructured" part of Unstructured Musings).

My frame of reference, at the time, took the form of traditional web pages. The big difference between a blog and a web page is that the latter is much more static. A personal page can go for months, or even years, without updates or new content and that's just fine. A blog, however, is dynamic and temporal. Although I had some sense of that, I didn't really appreciate how important it was to regularly post new content.

Within a few months (May, to be exact), I realized that weekly updates weren't cutting it so I went to an ironically structured format where I'd post new content three times a week: an essay every Sunday, a poem every Thursday, and a "fun" link every Tuesday, which means that I had committed to a structure where 2/3^rds of all my content was original and that half the original content took a very long and involved form.

Just writing the essays proved to be grueling. An average essay runs about 2,000 words and the majority of them required a fair amount of research on top of the original thought that went into them. Add to that the fact that I was also producing original poetry every single week and that I had to dig up a fun and interesting link in my spare time (to say nothing of all the background administration that goes into running a blog). What started out as a labor of love swiftly became a chore. The miraculous thing is that I kept up that pace, unabated, for more than a year.

By mid-2005, however, signs of strain were beginning to show up. I started missing my essay deadlines. In order to compensate for this, I switched to a bi-weekly essay format where every other work would be an off-site essay. Even this wasn't enough to eliminate the stress of producing the blog. By the end of 2005, I was writing essays that I weren't able to finish (which was utterly unfair to you, my readership).

2006 was the year that nearly broke the blog. A series of health and personal issues drained me of a significant fraction of my energy. The amount of original content dropped to nearly zero and even the derived content only came out as a trickle. By 2007 I was seriously considering shutting the whole thing down. This urge was compounded by Blogger going to a new style sheet format. Although it was possible to me to continue using the existing style sheets, if I wanted to make any changes, what so ever, to the formatting of the blog, I would need to convert it, which meant redesigning the style sheets from scratch.

June was Unstructured Musings' Rubicon. For the first time ever, I didn't post anything at all. I spent the entire month wondering if I should just pull the plug. On the one hand, there really is something I love about Unstructured Musings. Even though my readership is small, the quality of the commentary I've gotten from you has been amazing. There is also the fact that it's a creative outlet, for me, which is something I do need in my life. On the other hand, if blogging caused me more grief than happiness (especially in the form of guilt when go a long time without posting), perhaps it would be better to give it a quiet burial.

So I sat down and thought about it. And thought about it. And thought about it some more. Ultimately, I decided that I would like to keep the blog alive but that that I would need to change the way that I'm managing it, and whether I still wanted to.

I decided that the first decision was going to be whether or not to update the style sheet. If the blog was going to continue, I didn't want to keep clinging to the old sheet. Conversely, if I didn't think that it was worth redoing, then it wasn't worth continuing. Obviously, I did decide that it was worth it. The new look went live on July 25^th. This was a reboot both symbolic and literal.

The first, and biggest, change to the blog, beyond the cosmetics of the new style, is the way that I produce content. I've created a folder in my bookmarks called "Blog Fodder". Whenever I come across a link that seems cool, I bookmark it into that folder. Every so often, I'll take a chunk of the links I've bookmarked and then write up posts that link to them, saving those posts to draft, in Blogger (which means that they don't show up on the public page). This means that on any given day, I can just change the status of one of the queued posts from "draft" to "final" and I have a fresh post.

This has two benefits: 1) I have the ability to create fresh content on a daily basis and 2) if I'm not in the mood to work on the blog on a given day or week, I don't really have to beyond the minimal effort of getting something out of the draft bin. This also means that on those days when I do feel like blogging, I can put a whole bunch of things into the queue all at once to use in the future.

Naturally, this means that there's been a shift in content away from original and towards derived content. That doesn't mean, however, that there won't be any more original content; however, even there the focus is going to shift away from essays and towards shorter forms such as reviews, poems, and things like the archetype posts. I will still write essays and stories but those are going to be published on the order of several times a year instead of several times a month. Not only will that be considerably less exhausting for me but I think that it will result in a higher quality of essay, which will be good for you.

August was a deliberate experiment to see what sort of pace I could set for content generation. On average, I put up about 2 ¼ new posts a day. I was glad to discover that I could keep up that pace without exhausting myself. That said, I don't think you'll be seeing that many posts in a month again. Even though I didn't feel myself burning out in August, I could sense that I was pushing the limit. I would like to give myself more of a buffer so I'll be throttling back. Most days, I'll be limiting myself to a single post and, most of the time, that post will be something that's derived. I will try to have an original item on average of once a week but that item will usually take a short or medium form (i.e., under 500 words).

Change is always risky. Most of my regulars have stuck with me for some time and, judging by the poll I did on the subject, the thing you like most about the blog is when I do long and complicated posts such as essays and stories. I realize that by moving the emphasis away from those kinds of things, I risk losing your interest. Unfortunately, I just can't produce that type of content a frequent basis without destroying my own love for this place, which is also something I don't want to do. It is my sincere hope that the change in direction won't be too jarring and that I will be able to make it worth the while for you to keep me in your bookmarks.

Unstructured Poems and the Way of the Dodo

I have decided that this is going to be the last week that Unstructured Musing's sister site, Unstructured Poems, is going to be online.

The reasons for this are two fold:

1) I created Unstructured Poems at a time when I honestly thought that I could maintain two blogs. As it happens, even keeping one blog running can be an exhausting chore and two blogs, even when the second blog is half a blog, has simply been too much for me.

2) The main reason that I created it was to have a single place where all of my online poems could be read. With the addition of post labels, that's really no longer an issue since you can always just click on the Poem tag to see the whole list.

To be sure, I could leave the site up but I really hate the notion of perpetuating it as a mausoleum; I think that it's better to give it a dignified burial.

I'll leave it up until next Saturday just in case you'd like to visit the patient one last time before I pull the plug.

Blogging the Monster

On May 16, Brenda Kay Groene, her son Slade, and Brenda's boyfriend McKenzie were found bound and bludgeoned to death. Their two children, Dylan and Shasta, were missing. More than two weeks pass before Shasta is eventually spotted at a Denny's restaurant in the company of a known sex offender who is in violation of his parole — a man who, it is later reported, repeatedly molested her and her brother and who has, apparently, murdered Dylan. That man's name is Joe Duncan.

Joe Duncan is also the author of a blog called The Fifth Nail, named after a myth concerning a fifth nail that was intended to pierce the heart of Christ but which was hidden by gypsies. He used his blog to talk about himself and his status as a convicted offender. The blog, as of this moment, is still up.

It is a long and disturbing thing to read: the journal of a fallen person who struggles with his nature before falling even further into monstrousness. His early posts are exercises in self-justification and pity. He hates the fact that he's being continually "harassed" by the police. He denies that he's a pedophile. He insists that even though he is an offender, he is, never the less a victim.

At points he struggles to create a dialog. His tone is often rational and reasonable. He argues that society would be better off if we could prevent sexual offenses rather than punishing them after the fact. He argues that the stigmata of being an offender, and the efforts to publicize their status to their communities, make it difficult to recover. He believes that malicious people are using his information in an attempt to get the police to harass him (a task which, he is convinced, they are all too willing to perform).

He discusses the concept of responsibility and insists that responsibility must flow in two directions. An offender must accept responsibility for his actions but a community must, as well, accept responsibility for the offenders. Again, he argues that he, too, is a victim, as are all criminals.

He blogs about the trivia of everyday life. He complains about car trouble, talks about going skiing, and displays a fondness for certain video games. He takes care of his neighbors cats (he likes cats). He grouses about paying taxes. Sometimes he ponders philosophical questions. He wonders if there might be time travelers among us. These posts, which could be found on any blog, strike a counterpoint to a persistent and growing paranoia (he wonders if the police are tampering with his laptop and is convinced that Google is blacklisting him) — islands of normality in a turbulent sea.

He wants to be a good person. More importantly, he wants others to see him as a good person (and to see himself as one). He refuses to believe that he's bad — or at least wholly bad. He can not, however, stop seeing himself as being unfairly persecuted. He remains convinced that he is a victim. A victim of circumstance. A victim of the government. A victim of society. He rarely talks about his crime and never offers any apology to the boy he raped at gunpoint when he was sixteen. He doesn't mention that he tortured that boy with a cigarette, nor does he talk about convincing his victim that he was going to die. It is apparent that he craves absolution without atonement.

He does ponder the issue of sex crimes in the abstract: "What would ever make a person behave so angrily toward another completely innocent person? Could it be that that innocent person somehow represents society, and the violation is some kind of attempt to regain control...I'm no psychologist, but I do know ignorance never solved anything."

He frequently compares himself to historical victims. He claims that his situation is similar to a black man suffering under Jim Crow laws. He opines that there will soon be separate drinking fountains and bathrooms for sex offenders. He sometimes claims that he feels like a Jew living in Nazi Germany. He asks, "what red blooded American would stick up for a sex offender? And, what Arian blooded Nazi would stick up for a Jew? If you think there is a difference, then think again."

Much of the content of the site is religious. He struggles with God. He struggles with the idea of redemption. He often focuses on Christ's message of forgiveness and berates those who are unwilling to offer such. He strives to understand the will of God. Towards the end, he says that he has faith that God makes no mistakes and that everything that happens is for the good. The closer he comes to approaching the point of no return, the more he obsesses about religion.

Finally, he appears to suffer a breakdown. It seems as though all of his rationalizations as well as all his attempts to find spiritual solace have failed him. In his fourth to last entry he writes

So, I've been accused of molesting a little boy. Those close to me know I didn't do it of course, how could I, I'm not even a pedophile. Well, I'm not a psychopath either, I feel the full force and pain of everyone I have ever hurt, but that doesn't stop me from doing what I need to do. Ultimately my feelings don't matter, I learned that in prison. I have to carry out my orders or a lot worse than just me dying could happen.

On this third to last entry, he writes about wrestling with his demons: "I'm afraid, very afraid. If they win then a lot of people will be badly hurt, and they've had their way before, so I know what they can do. I'’ve been praying a lot and asking God for help. I've asked him to step in and intercede directly, because I see no other way at this point that I can win."

The title of his second to last entry is, chillingly, The Demons Have Taken Over. He says that he's failed and that the demons have won. He believes that the "good Joe" has died. He says that his intent is to strike out at society and to do it as much harm has he can.

His final entry is titled Still Confused. It is written by a person who is already a fujitive from justice for violation of parole. He claims that he has lost all sense of right and wrong. He pities his mother for having a defective son but, in the very next paragraph, dismisses her pain because, in a hundred years, she'll be dead. His tone is nihilistic but he insists that he does have feelings. In fact he believes that he "must be more sensitive than most people". He hopes that people will eventually understand that he's "not a bad person" and that he has "a disease contracted from society". Just as with his very first blog post, he persists in viewing himself as the true victim.

His final entry was written on May 13. Three days later a family would be destroyed and two children would be initiated into a nightmare from which only one would return alive.

Unstructured Umlauts

If last year was the Year of the Blog, I would like to think that this year will be the Year of the Wiki. A wiki is essentially like any other web page with one crucial difference: anyone can edit the pages.

It's one of those things that sounds like it really ought to not work but actually does work surprisingly well. The most famous wiki is, of course, Wikipedia which is an on-line encyclopedia that's actually giving such well established brands as Britannica a run for their money (although the editors of established encyclopedias have made a point of contemptuously dismissing the challenge — with just a bit too much protest).

Todays link is to a flash documentary of how a particular Wikipedia page evolved, that being Jon Udell's Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Movie. Although the topic of the heavy metal umlaut is a bit silly, the history of the page is actually a marvelous example of how Wikipedia pages grown via collaboration and how, in particular, they resist spurious and vandelous edits.

As a final note, the Wikipedia entry for the heavy metal umlaut has already been updated to include Jon Udell's analysis as an external link.

An Unstructured Year

Blogger, in their effort to encourage the art of blogging, periodically publishes articles whose intended function is to give advice and words of encouragement to the bloggers that use their service.

Last September they published an article on how one should go about promoting ones blog. Included in the article were a number of suggestions on how to make a blog successful. Two, in particular, have stood out in my memory:

1. Keep your blog on topic
2. Keep your posts brief

As of the Tuesday after next, I will have spent a full year in flagrant violation of these cardinal rules.

For nearly a year now, I’ve been publishing poems, pointers to various sites, and all sorts of random thoughts and observations on any number of things. On a regular basis I have also (though not without the occasional lapse) been posting weekly essays on topics ranging from the moral basis of law with regards to the question of free will to the subject of what philosophers have to say about telling the difference between one’s ass and a hole in the ground. My essays have ranged in length from short ones barely over five hundred words to monsters exceeding seven thousand with the majority falling somewhere between fifteen hundred and twenty-five hundred words.

According to Blogger, my blog should not be a success. So, is it a failure?

Like many blogs out there, I employ a tracking tool that helps me see how many hits I get as well as some basic information on the sorts of hits I get (see chart). On an average day I get about 20 unique visits. Of those twenty, about 5 will be from returning visitors (although that can be difficult to estimate). Of the new visitors, an average of two will click through to the archive. Looking at overall hit indicators, I would guess that I have about fifteen regular visitors and another ten who come here semi-regularly (although there is a lot of inference involved in coming up with those numbers).



In terms of sheer popularity, this would suggest that I do not, in fact, have a successful blog. If I were actually attempting to make money off of the blog, for instance (say via click-thru advertising), I might have enough traffic to grant me the cost of a candy bar a few times a year. Nor am I getting the sorts of numbers that would allow me to see myself as any sort of popular pundit. If I were doing this for the sake of having a wide audience to gratify my ego, I should have taken down my shingle within the first few months.

Fortunately, my standards of success aren’t entirely dependant on the size of my audience. I want to be clear that when I say it isn’t entirely dependant that I do place value on having an audience. If that weren’t the case, there would be no need for me to publish these musings of mine online. There certainly wouldn’t be a good reason to keep posting essays week after week. While I do esteem my audience (especially those regulars who have deigned to put me in their bookmarks), I would much rather have a thoughtful audience than a vast audience.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that it took me awhile to realize this. When I started Unstructured Musings, I genuinely did hope that I’d have hundreds of people hanging from my every word. When I didn’t see those numbers, I grew concerned and tried to employ a few gimmicks. Back in June I spent some money on a service that promised to deliver unique hits to the site. The site did exactly as it promised. For several months, I’d regularly get well over a hundred hits. The problem was that none of them ever seemed to return and few of them even bothered to click to the archives. Examining where I was being hit from helped to explain why. My of my hits were coming from outside the US. I doubt that most of the people who came to me via that service even spoke English. Of those who did, it seemed apparent that few of them would have had any interest in the content of the site once they got here.

Then there was the Gmail contest that I held back in June. This was back when Gmail accounts were still hard to come by and people were willing to go to some lengths to get them. I offered a free gmail account to whoever posted the most insightful comment to any of my essays. I got a handful of takers, all of them exhibiting the bare minimum of effort necessary to constitute a reply. In retrospect, my little contest seems pathetically desperate.

Since then, I’ve learned to relax and allow my readership to grow naturally and it has, in fact, grown. Looking at the graph over the whole of the year, I’ve been getting a slow but steady increase in hits. Even more gratifying, I’ve finally started getting comments and feedback on a fairly regular basis — again, not a lot, but enough to deduce a trend. Better yet, the quality of the commentary has been very high. The people who have taken the time to reply to my essays have clearly put a lot of thought into their replies, which thrills me to no end. I’ve also spotted a number of unsolicited reviews of the site which have been uniformly complimentary.

Even though I’m not reaching a lot of people, it does seem that I am making a good impression on those people who I am reaching. I am proud that I have an audience of people who are intelligent and thoughtful, who take the time to give my musing consideration, and who are having their thoughts provoked by my essays.

For me, this is success. I could not have, in all earnestness, hoped for more.

It is at this point that I want to thank you for being with me this last year. It is also at this point that I need to announce a change to the site.

When I started doing this, I committed myself to a very ambitious schedule of posting once a week. I made the schedule even more ambitious by adding in weekly posts for poetry and interesting sites and then compounded that by launching the Unstructured Poems sister site. As I was doing all this, I wondered if I were crazy. In retrospect, I am certain that I was. I enjoy writing essays but an essay a week is a grueling schedule, especially considering that this is an unpaid hobby. While I have no regrets for the last year, I have to confess that this is a schedule that I can no longer maintain. In addition to a new and demanding (although enjoyable) job, I have also found that the effort of getting these essays out has been cutting into my home life and my reading time. This last is particularly frustrating given that it is my readings that, ultimately, provide the inspiration for the majority of my essays.

I am not quitting, but I am cutting back. Instead of a weekly essay, I will try to get a fresh essay out once every other week. Tuesday Fun and the Thursday Poetry Slam will remain on the same schedule. I would also like to continue providing something every Sunday. One idea I’d like to try out is providing pointers to quality offsite essays every second week (as I did two weeks ago). I’m also going to try and see if I can solicit some guest essays once in awhile. Any other thoughts or suggestions are certainly welcome.

Be assured, I am not throwing in the towel. Writing Unstructured Musings has been one of the definite high points of this last year and I intend to continue publishing it well into the future and I hope that you will continue to read it so long as I continue to write it.

Here’s looking forward to another wordy and topically unfocused year.

On Blogger Burnout

Wired Magazine recently had a article on "Blogger Burnout". The articles focus is on why people who show initial enthusiasm for blogging often given it up not because they've lost interest in blogging, per se, but because they've simply reached a point where they're mentally and emotionally exhausted by the effort of posting entries.

Certainly I've seen signs of the phenomenon often enough. Some blogs start out at a furious pace of posting article daily or even multiple times a day. Eventually daily posts give way to weekly posts, then monthly posts, then posts on an entirely irregular schedule eventually followed by a persistent silence. Alternatively, some blogs start out on a regular posting schedule and keep it up for a fairly long amount of time and then just stop, one day, for no apparent reason.

I think that one of the problems of blogging is that it's very easy to come to think of it as an obligation. Once that perspective creeps in, it goes from being a hobby to being a task. Essentially, it becomes an unpaid job. One might well continue to post out of a sense of duty to one's readers but that can only go on for so long especially since such an attempt to post out of duty becomes, itself, progressively more of a burden. After awhile, it's inevitable that you're going to simply say "screw it" and walk away.

By like measure, a blog can be killed by a creeping sense of apathy. Most people who start up blogs come to the venture with a head full of ideas. Eventually, however, that initial stock of ideas becomes depleted and a person is left feeling that they either have to write about something that they don't really care about or, alternative, not write anything at all. Many blogs die with a shrug.

When I started Unstructured Musings I was mindful of both of these tendencies. The first and foremost thing that I decided was that I would write to an audience but that I would also write for myself. I want this to be an interesting and informative place for anyone who decides to look in here, of course, but even more important than that is that this remains something fun for me to do. My blogging is very much a hobby and, as such, ought to be a source of enjoyment (and believe me, it has been).

I deliberately started out slow with the goal of publishing an essay once a week on Sunday along with scattered missives, as they struck me, over the remainder of the week. As I grew more comfortable with the weekly posts I eventually added regular "fun" posts on Tuesday as well as samples of my poetry on Thursday. I decided to add those in because finding cool things on the web is easy enough and I also have quite a large stock of poetry (and an utter lack of shame when it comes to subjecting the rest of the world to it).

My biggest concern has been the essays. I enjoy writing essays but essay writing can be demand and I also recognize that every person goes through dry spells. My solution to this problem is two pronged. I publish my essays on a weekly basis but I write them as they come to me. Some weeks I'll only have a single essay come to mind, others I'll have three, and some I'll have none at all. The overall result of this is that I have a pool of pending essays to draw from. As I'm writing this particular essay, I have a further eleven essays in the pool "before" it (I don't always publish them in the order that I wrote them). As such, if I did hit a dry spell, I could go without writing anything for nearly a full three months before I reached a point where I wouldn't have anything to publish on Sunday. This also means that I can relax and deliberate take time off from blogging in order to allow my mental batteries to recharge, without any interruption to my readers, as I have already done at several points.

But what happens if I exhaust the queue? Well, if I run out of general topics, I can always resort to publishing book and film reviews (since I have an avid interest in both). If that grows boring, I can resort to the second prong which is, quite simply, to put the essays on hiatus.

I would still publish the Tuesday Fun and the Thursday Poetry Slam posts (giving my modest readership something to look forward to). In the meanwhile, I would continue to write essays as they came to me. If that meant going a year or two, so be it. Once I had another stock of essays stored up, I'd start publishing them again.

The bottom line, I think, is that a good blogger needs to be in control of their blog and not the other way around. If a blog starts to intrude upon family or work or starts to become a point of stress then, I think, the point of blogging has been lost.

I think that the very best blog strategy is simply to keep a sense of perspective. Being a blogger, there is a temptation to want to be a latter day Samuel Pepys but the truth of the matter is that the majority of blogs (and certainly my own) are only ever going to have a small audience. Some may find that disappointing but I, for one, consider it a liberation. I don't have a vast audience and I am not being critically judged by forces of history; therefore, I can write to my own interests and at my own pace.

I love blogging. I would encourage anyone who's interested in it to give it a whirl. All I would suggest is that you don't lose sight of your motivations for trying it out. Keep it fun and make it an enjoyment unto yourself.