Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
II
Trees and Forests
Blogging brings to life that ancient philosophical question: If a tree falls in the forest, and there's
no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?
People blog for different reasons, but most bloggers at least want to make their blogs available to
people who are likely to be interested in the content. Others have overtly commercial motives and
want to capture as many eyeballs as possible to monetize them—the sort of language that grates
on the ears of those with more purely creative concerns.
The great thing about blogging is that we can all learn from each other; we can even pursue differ-
ent goals at different times. The nonprofit WordPress community, made up of thousands of enthu-
siasts, supports and manages the open source WordPress code base, all while sporting a
profit-making head, Automattic.
So it doesn't matter what your motives are; you can blog for any reason you want, and you can
work to bring in more users for any reason you want as well. Whatever your motives for blogging,
though, it's likely that building up your audience will help you achieve them.
Putting Your Posts in Categories
The Web has unleashed a creative explosion from people—and a corresponding mania to find
what's valuable among the outpouring. Putting your posts in categories is a great contribution to
helping your blog visitors find the posts that are likely to be interesting and useful to them.
Remember that in the previous chapter, we described categories as resembling a table of contents
for posts and tags as being like an index. A topic rarely shows up in two places in the table of con-
tents and, similarly, categories should be brutally simple, whereas the same keyword or topic can
show up many places as shown by the index, which is a lighter and more flexible tool.
Categorizing is a fair amount of work, and doing it badly might be worse than not bothering to do it
at all. It's worth putting in the effort to learn how to categorize your posts and to manage the cate-
gories so they're useful from the beginning of your blog and continue to be useful over time.
tip
The average person can remember 4 to 7 things in short-term memory—so if someone is
looking through a list of your categories to find what's interesting, having only that many will
make it easy for them. People also are used to dealing with lists of 10 and groups of a dozen.
Beyond that number, a list—such as a list of categories—might look too long for someone to
bother with; the Web being what it is, they might then surf away somewhere else. (You might
be hard pressed to make constructive use of a longer list as well.)
If you have more than 10 or 12 ways to describe your posts, the simple solution is to use tags,
described later in this chapter. The extreme solution is to start another blog or two to accom-
modate what is clearly your very broad range of interests!
