Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
I
Personal Journalism
Growing up reading comic topics, or watching Superman movies, many of us envied Clark Kent,
“mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet,” almost as much as we did Superman, the Man of
Steel. Being a reporter has long appealed to many of us who weren't one, though in these days of
cutbacks in newspapers and magazines, the dream has dimmed a bit.
Blogging allows people to jump onto the spectrum of journalistic roles at all sorts of different points,
from occasional commentary on local issues to full-time advocacy of a point of view, backed by
professional-level reporting accompanied by insightful commentary.
Personal journalism is satisfying for a while as a solo activity, but of course, it soon requires some
degree of readership to make sense. So bloggers of this bent are usually looking to grow their
reader base.
WordPress.com is an excellent match for this kind of blogging. It's easy enough to make getting
started quick and convenient, but deep enough to scale as posts accumulate. Built-in category sup-
port and the ability to easily connect to other, related blogs via
trackbacks
and
pings
(notification
tools described in Chapter 4, “Creating Your First Post”) are among the many features of WordPress
that support this often very serious, even driven, kind of blogging.
The built-in statistics in WordPress are a gift for this kind of blogging. You don't have to do any
extra work at all to get good, useful, up-to-date statistics on visits to your blog.
A blog run by one of the authors (Smith), Google Voice Daily, is of
this type. The blog tracks news and opinion about Google Voice,
a telephony-related service from Google that has received its ini-
tial release only in the United States—and has been in the news
frequently since. Figure 1.3 shows traffic for the blog in a period
in the first two weeks of its life. The traffic chart is right in the
Dashboard—you can't miss it, which is perfect for those of us
starting out.
The biggest concern a proto-journalist might have with
WordPress.com is the lack of ways to make money. However, as I
mentioned previously, it usually takes most of us a lot of time and
effort to get the kind of pageviews that might help pull in even a
few dollars a month of revenue. WordPress allows you to get
started with a very easy platform, and draw on a very supportive
community, until you reach the level of productivity and popular-
ity at which an upgrade to using WordPress.org, as described in
the second half of this topic, makes sense.
tip
When trying to calculate what
your blog might be worth,
remember that a penny per
pageview is an excellent result
for a typical blogger. At that
(high) rate, 1,000 pageviews is
worth $1. So until you're up
around 100,000 pageviews per
month—$100 per month at this
rate of return—you're not even
potentially losing enough money
by staying ad free to offset the
expense and hassle of using
WordPress.org instead of
WordPress.com.
