A blog about blogging. There is probably a special hell for people like me.

^{My outstanding friend and colleague Kate monster asked me to talk about blogging to the good people coming to blog LGBT history at the Museum of London.  "A cinch" I thought.  "I read and comment blogs all the time and write highly opinionated copy, this will be no problem."  As the day loomed (tomorrow naturally) I began to have DOUBTS.  "Maybe I should try out this blog business" I thought, "perhaps there is something difficult about it, maybe there are esoteric pitfalls and tribulations unimaginable to anyone who doesn't have a blog?"  So here I am blogging about blogging.  This is such an excercise in navel contemplation that I repulse even myself.  Please feel free to destroy it in the comments section and maybe I will write something better next time in retaliation.}

^{A short history of Blogging}

The word “blog” has now become a noun, a verb and an occupation allowing the creation of sentences like: Bloggers blog on their blogs, which are then blogged about by other bloggers creating a beautiful circle of blog.

Once upon a time, blog was a contraction of the term web log.  Web logs existed in the 90s and were maintained by computer programming enthusiasts as lists of tech savvy links and information sharing posts about the latest advancements in break through geekery.

Blogging is… speaking directly to your customers

^{(Source http://xkcd.com/741/)}

These days no one talks about web logs.  They talk about blogs.  When they talk about blogs they envision something personal that operates like an online diary, in that posts are chronological and generally offer an insight into the mind and opinions of the writer.  Today’s blogs are comparable to opinion columns in newspapers.  They are both informative and topical.  They also allow readers to become involved with the blogger by posting comments under each post which will be answered by other users and by the blogger him or herself.

This type of blog has been around for about 15 years or so, the first recognizable en mass community blog was probably LiveJournal started by Brad Fitzpatrick in March 1999.

So much innovation, so new and exciting, but when you think about it nothing is truly new under the sun.  Samuel Pepys started his diary in Jan 1660, it has been put online here: http://www.pepysdiary.com/about/.  In content it’s not really that much different to a LiveJournal, it just needs more references to cats.

Blogs are used by individuals, companies and institutions to reach their readers/ customers/ visitors by becoming part of their daily lives in the same way as reading a newspaper used to be and checking your facebook updates is today.  Sounds simple enough, but in order to secure that position in someone’s life you have to earn it by being interesting, informative and above all entertaining.  Most personal bloggers achieve this by writing about subjects with universal appeal viz: raptors zombies and pirates.  This is so common that it has become a blogging in joke.

There are many many blogging platforms out there these days.  They can be roughly split into three categories based on length and originality of posts –

Macro blogs – These include custom blogs, which are sometimes stand alone websites such as Georgian London or in other cases they are attached to an institution like Museum of London.  Others are hosted by providers like wordpress or blogger.com.  These blogs usually contain original self penned posts that look at one subject in detail and are longer than a couple of paragraphs.  As a general rule they will be updated once or twice a week.

Micro blogs – These are the other end of the scale and include Twitter accounts where each post is under 140 characters and facebook status updates which are a bit longer.  The content of these is usually a mixture of self referential observation e.g. “I ate a cake, OMG”, opinion: “Jurassic Park is the best film ever”, retweets or shared posts (essentially recycling other peoples content with a credit) and links to “cool stuff” (usually raptor ninja pirate related).    These micro bloggers are your target, you want to be that cool stuff.  As a general rule micro blogs are updated once every 5 seconds.

Midi blogs – These sit halfway between Twitter and wordpress and are a crafty market filler for people who want to write a blog one day, but meantime are happy to recycle other people’s content in a Twitter “retweet” style.  Tumblr is the most popular of these and is an entertaining mixture of links, wry observational humour, informative posts, banal nonsense, images, videos and inevitably pirates zombies and raptors.  One of the strengths of Tumblr is the dashboard which allows the user to have a pick and mix approach to the site.  You choose some people to follow and then their posts are interspliced on your dashboard landing page.   Midi blogs are usually updated once a day around lunchtime…

Enough tenuous history please, skip to content!

Okay.

CONTENT

With history blogs people are looking for information, dinner party anecdotes and links to share on their facebook wall/ twitter stream/ Tumblr so they can bask in the reflected glory of your erudition.  Your audience trusts you to be authoritative on your subject, but woe betide if you’re a bit dry as they also expect you to be entertaining.

People who read blogs are looking for quick and easy gratification.  To provide this and therefore be appealing, there are a few simple rules:

• Write in plain English, long words are definitely cool for those who appreciate them, but sadly this is not the vast majority of web users.  Similarly text speak and emoticons (smiley faces) will appeal to some but are a big turn off for others.

• Break up your content into short paragraphs of no more than 4 or 5 short sentences.  This is called chunking and makes reading a long piece of prose a less daunting prospect for your visitors.

• Make sure you read all your comments and reply to them when relevant, this is essential to make your readers feel valued and encourage them to make repeat visits to your page.  It can also be very useful to you as occasionally readers will tell you something you don’t know or flag up a new area of research.

• Post as often as possible.  People like to see new content and to feel that they are part of something immediate.  Once a week is adequate, more often is desirable.

• Be excited about what you are writing, not to the extent of pointing out how amazing it is every other sentence or using multiple exclamation marks – a definite turn off for most people - rather by highlighting the exciting facts of your topic.  If you are writing about something that has recently undergone conservation for example, you could talk about how long it is since it last was cleaned or who might have used it last or the complicated chemical process.

• Use lots of hyperlinks within your text that open into new tabs or pages, people like to be able to click into a topic if they want to find out more.  So in the hypothetical conservation post you could link to a page that details the process or describes a situation where the object could have been in use.   If you can hyperlink to yourself or a page within your organization so much the better, if not, there is no shame in linking to another museum or alternative source you can trust.  Wikipedia can be a viable option if you are confident the page is factual and unlikely to be attractive to a joke editor who might change it while your back is turned.

• Use lots of pictures and don’t be shy of embedding videos.  Always credit these accurately.  If possibly provide the option for the visitor to click for a higher res version.  You can always watermark images if there is a likelihood they will be downloaded and used illegally.  Caption your images clearly.  For some reason people ALWAYS read image captions.

• Don’t neglect other social media outlets, simultaneously micro blog using sites such as twitter and facebook to keep people’s attention on your blog.  Updates such as “Downstairs in the Museum of London looking at a gay Roman god” give people a taste of what’s to come in your next post.  On the internet, familiarity, far from breeding contempt, engenders a sense of camaraderie and loyalty and results in happy confident followers.

• Remember that writing about something can change it.  Today we will be looking at a series of objects and historical references that have been picked because they provide evidence of lesbian gay bi and transgender people in the historical record.  By grouping them like this we are changing them by adding a new dimension to what they signify to people. 

The writer’s gaze defines and sometimes limits a subject – a good example of this is in the field of archaeological interpretation.  Up until a few years ago prehistoric man and women had definite gender roles.  Men did the killing and women did the cooking, so far, so not rocking the boat.  

A touching pastiche from the website http://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/themes/periods/2_mesolithic/mesolithic_hunting_camps.  Note that the man is presenting the woman with what appears to be a dead beaver.  She is a lucky lady.

These gender roles were defined by predominantly male archaeologists working from evidence found in the burial assemblages of the elite members of society.  Sometimes women were found with knives and spears and men were found with weaving weights and cookery pots.  Most of the time both genders were found with beads and not much else.  Did the archaeologists and illustrators of history books allow this to worry them in any way?  Certainly not.  So up until the late 80s the gaze of these individuals defined the gender stereotyping of people who lived thousands of years ago, making it conveniently fit with our own. 

Thankfully we now have gender archaeology to set that right, but like feminism, it is too easily dismissed as the bleating of bleeding heart bra burners by its detractors who one can only assume think wistfully of the good old 1950s.

This aspect of blogging is good in that you can, by skillful writing pull out an angle of an object that will provoke thought and in some cases epiphanies in the minds of your readers. 

It is dangerous in that sometimes people FEAR CHANGE and don’t really want a new and exciting angle.  These people can become personal and angry defending their views in your comments box.  The best thing to do with them is talk to them reasonably and never ever be personal or angry back at them.  If they are mad enough they can be a positive asset as everyone loves a car crash and will tell all their friends about it thus driving your traffic up.

Blogging is… sharing opinions

^{(Source http://xkcd.com/386/)}

Handled correctly most “negative” feedback can be turned positive, so don’t be scared about posting something slightly controversial as long as you can substantiate it.  By their very nature blogs are opinion based so are a perfectly valid forum for discussing new ideas without any stigma attached if you end up having to admit to any holes in your argument or theory.

I am now going to post this on my blog.  Feel free to come and tell me I’m wrong.  I can take it.

Links

^{General useful}

^{Glossary of blogging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_blogging_terms}

^{How to start a blog: http://www.masternewmedia.org/independent_publishing/blogging-how-to-blog/guide-to-publishing-first-blog-20071104.htm}

^{Blog about Caesar being gay: http://www.slapupsidethehead.com/2010/11/dr-flamingo-jones-and-the-queen-of-rome/
Gender Archaeology in Paleolithic Art http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk/MultimediaStudentProjects/99-00/9608559r/project/html/introduction.html
Gender archaeology isn't really covered fully in one place on the internet, I'd recommend Handbook of Gender in Archaeology
Putting the gay into gaze: Dr Mechowski of the V&A discusses the female nude and lesbian spectatorship:
http://www.untoldlondon.org.uk/community/lgbt/article/female-nude-and-lesbian-spectatorship}

^Platforms

^{Tumblr http://www.tumblr.com/about}

^{Wordpress  http://wordpress.org/about/}

^{Blogger http://www.blogger.com/tour_start.g}

^{Twitter http://www.twitter.com}

^{Facebook http://www.facebook.com}

^{Popular topics}

^{Raptors: http://theoatmeal.com/quiz/velociraptor_bed}

^{Zombies: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/01/somehow-i-ended-up-fighting-zombies.html}

^{Pirates: http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2006/08/friday_sprog_blogging_pirates.php}