Blogger Heaven

South China Morning Post
Sunday, November 4, 2007
by, David Wilson

Like traffic jams, spam and summer flies, blogs drive me crazy. My main gripe is the rambling usually terminated by a phrase, such as 'now to the subject of this post'. Then there's the overwriting and slapdash spelling.
 
However, I sometimes discover a blogger who softens the blow of daily life, marrying keen reporting with a sense of poetry and contriving to be punchy yet stylish.

So this week we train the spotlight on a case study. If you are not too squeamish, visit the blog operated by San Francisco-based erotic novelist Greta Christina (gretachristina.typepad.com).

Ironically for someone with a bachelor of arts degree in religion and whose name Google interprets as 'Great Christian', the blogger recently kicked up a storm with an expletive-peppered post about atheism. The post was pounced on by Digg (www.digg.com), the news aggregate site that lets readers vote on which stories from any online source they like best. Christina's story has attracted 950 diggs and counting, and reached No 7.

So you want to know how you bash out a blog that reaches those giddy heights? The answer is simple: hit a nerve. More than well written, Christina's post captured what many are thinking and feeling. 'I also got a huge spike in my traffic from Reddit, Delicious and other 'hey-look-at this-cool-blog' sources,' she says.

As for money, blogging brings some indirectly to the 45-year-old writer. A mail-order company she worked for now pays her to write a once-weekly blog instalment - a gig she would not have secured without her own virtual podium.

Her online stage also spawns publicity, which leads to book sales and freelance work. 'Indirectly, it may turn out to be the single most important thing I've ever done to promote my writing,' she says. Before her Atheist and Anger post and its Digg listing, her blog traffic was modest, averaging between 400 and 600 hits a day, with occasional spikes of 1,000 or so. After the post, her daily traffic leapt into five figures - on the day it hit Digg, it soared to more than 40,000.

'It's calming down again now, but I have no idea yet what the ultimate increase in my traffic will be,' says Christina. Her technical platform is blogging service TypePad (www.typepad.com), which also hosts the likes of marketer and author Seth Godin, political commentator Andrew Sullivan and Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip.
 
Other popular blog platforms include WordPress (wordpress.org), which claims to 'focus on aesthetics', and the most user-friendly of the bunch, Google-owned Blogger (www.blogger.com), which works extremely well but screams 'beginner', according to media consultant Eric Kuhn, a blogger for the politically liberal online news site The Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com).

Pondering whether the market is overcrowded, Kuhn says thousands of blogs exist, each with its own purpose.
 
'There is so much out there, but people find a few blogs that really interest them and read them religiously,' says Kuhn. But can you make money from blogging? He says no. We will explore that issue in more depth next time.