Compass Designs .net

A blog is a modern communication vehicle that is becoming more and more important in today's Web-connected world.

/rant on

A blog is not TrackBacks, pings, Digg It buttons, blog rolls, permalinks, or Google ad sense. You will see all of these things on a blog (hopefully not all at once), but these are just features of a blog. You can have a successful blog, even the top 50 heavyweight, without any of these. As you create your blog, make sure you don't let the trees get in the way of seeing the great potential of the woods.

I would not go so far as to say that there are not benefits to be found in social bookmarking sites such as Digg or del.icio.us, but I don't think it's as critical as people make it out to be - for several reasons.

First is information overload. It's very common to see blogs with a whole row of social bookmark tags. I think that these are going the way that banner ads have over the last few years; site visitors have a blind spot for them.

Second, if someone wants to bookmark your site with one of these other sites, they can do it anyway; they don't need your insistent icon asking them to do so.

Last, according to Digg itself, 94% of Digg users are male. 88% of Digg users are in the 18-39 year age range, and 52% of them are "IT professionals, developers, or engineers." That's a very narrow demographic. Unless you have a blog that is targeted at this demographic, none of the ensuing traffic you might get will do much good anyway. It's unfocussed, untargeted, and will not convert very well.

/rant off