Beyond Economics

Here are a couple of lengthy, but interesting (if you are into that) posts about blogging:

From The Baseline Scenario:
How to Win Friends and Influence People

From Reuters:
Notes on Blogging for Journalists

The quick bottom line:

• It’s a conversation
• It’s about synthesizing information
• It can take months or years to get noticed
• Don’t necessarily worry about readership, you are doing it for yourselves. If you are having fun, others will follow.
• Quantity is more important than quality, i.e. a blog is not a magazine. If you try for journalistic excellence, you won’t get much out there. Here’s a metaphor from a comment in the second post:

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

Effort expended attempting to produce high quality works is not the same as actually producing high quality work.  – Posted by Unlikely