Blogging About Blogging
Friday, 27 April 2018
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(Back from vacation! Thank you all for waiting.)
Volokh Conspiracy, run primarily by law professor Eugene Volokh, is the best "explainer" blog in my opinion. The explaining portion of VC (again, because explainer is not the only thing that VC does) presents the ideal form of an explainer blog: pick the current event topic du jour; identify an angle that is not previously discussed, and; applying the author's expertise, explain that angle. For example, when the infamous University of Virginia gang rape story by the Rolling Stone turned out to be a hoax, VC explained an angle that was within the author's experitise, but not really explored by the mainstream media: i.e., whether UVA has a libel claim against the Rolling Stone. (Pay no mind to the fact that the Washington Post, a mainstream media outlet, now carries VC, since the Post does not really exercise editorial authority over VC.) Speaking of China, run by Jocelyn Eikenburg, is a great "seeking empathy" blog. Eikenburg, as a white woman living in China being married to a Chinese man, has a relatively uncommon experience to share. Eikenburg intelligently discusses the many situations she faces by virtue of being a part of an interracial couple in China, and her emotional reaction to such situations. By doing so, Eikenburg presents a new perspective to people who are not familiar with the circumstance like hers, and builds empathetic support among people who are in the similar circumstance as she. - Maximize your platforms. Recognize what type of contents you are likely to produce, and choose the platform accordingly. To push something short, Twitter and Instagram; long reads, any one of the blogging sites (e.g. Wordpress, Blogger, Medium, etc.) It is fine to be on multiple platforms, with each platform having a different focus. TK, for example, uses this blog for long pieces about Korea. TK's Facebook is for giving short impressions on current events in English, and TK's Twitter is for discussing current events in Korean. For best results, mix and match. For example, even if all you write is long reads, you can still use Twitter to share your article, preferably with a short pull-quote that catches the reader's eyes. (One exercise that Taman Kanak-kanak has been doing is to imagine all sentences he writes as pull-quotes. The exercise forces him to write punchier sentences.) If you are effective in using pictures or moving gifs to highlight your writing, you can use those graphics on Instagram to lead the readers into the article.
If managing multiple sites appear too unwieldy, there are websites and utilities that allow you to manage many different social networking services, such as Twitterfeed. Allow Taman Kanak-kanak to go back to his initial points, because they are absolutely critical: to have a blogger with a good amount of readership, you need to be a good writer who writes a lot, regularly. Good luck. Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com. |
