Why Relinquish Your Content?

Published by

Clarissa

January 14, 2014

I know a couple of people who are very prolific on Facebook. Every day they post anywhere up to a dozen imaginative comments, interesting links, great photos, talented articles, etc. All of the income and fame generated by them goes to Zuckerberg.

It is a mystery to me why such people don’t start their own blogs and get at least a small portion of the income and all of the fame that they create with their writing, turning their Facebook pages into a place where they only post personal news and keep in touch with family and friends.

If you have the need and the capacity to be very productive and engaged online, why not make it work for you?

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16 responses to “Why Relinquish Your Content?”

J. Otto Pohl

January 14, 2014

Because with a handful exceptions most blogs have almost no readers. I have seven blog readers versus 25 face book readers (out of 261 friends). Either way there is no fame or fortune. But, the blog gets way less attention.

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 14, 2014
  
  You can’t really know how many people actually read your blog. Many people read in their feed readers that might not reflect in your stats. Feedly doesn’t seem to reflect in reader stats. (Sadly.) And that’s where I read all the blogs I follow.
  
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  1. J. Otto Pohl
    
    January 15, 2014
    
    True I am just going by the limited information I have.
    
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Z

January 14, 2014

Instant response to certain teaching and research questions from some FB groups I am in.

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Tim

January 14, 2014

I think there are two big differences.

The first is the content format. Rarely does a blog survive on photos, smart comments or snide remarks. You need more elaborate* articles and posts. On the other hand, the amount of text in this very blog post is probably already bordering on too much. Nobody is going to read that wall of text.

The second is the audience and how you reach them. On facebook, your audience is probably your friends and families, co-workers and the like. On a blog, your audience has more strangers, at least potentially.

Talking about potential, a blog has the potenial to reach a much, much greater audience, provided you can attraced them. On facebook, th amount of people is a lot more limited, but kind of assured. Most people don’t friend you because your content is so awesome, they friend you because they want to stay in contact with you. Your content is a nice extra at best, tolerable at worst.

* I realise that our definition of elaborate probably differs. I am very write-lazy.

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 14, 2014
  
  OK, I’ll try to post less then.
  
  Maybe I need a spillover blog, or something.
  
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  1. Tim
    
    January 14, 2014
    
    Argh, I made a mistake 🙂
    
    What I meant was, that blogs need longer and more elaborate content and can’t thrive completely on short stuff while it is the exact opposite holds true for facebook. Sorry, I lost a sentence or so in that first paragraph.
    
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2. Benoni
  
  January 14, 2014
  
  If you’re going to criticise a blogger for posting a “wall of text”, you probably ought to make sure your criticism is shorter than the text wall in question. Your comment is 176 words, while Clarissa’s post is only 160.
  
  Of course, in reality only people with very short attention spans consider 160 words TL;DR material. 😛
  
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  1. Tim
    
    January 14, 2014
    
    Touché 😉
    
    I kind of fucked up my point here. What I was trying to say is that different platforms of course are optimized (both technically and socially) for different content. Try to run a blog like a twitter account, for example. I don’t think that is going to work very well 🙂 Same applies to facebook and tumblr and whatever is just in right now.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      January 15, 2014
      
      Thank you, Tim, for creating an opportunity for a new poll. I love polls. 🙂 🙂
      
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good enough cook

January 14, 2014

You’d inspired me even before I read this post! http://goodenoughprofessor.blogspot.com/
Yes, I’m a FB junkie, and I also find myself leaving a lot of good material in comment threads on other people’s blogs. 🙂
And FWIW, I think your rate of posting is just fine, and I’m not clear on why anyone would find it a problem. “Ignore the stuff you don’t feel like reading” seems like an obvious principle for dealing with the internet in general.

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Z

January 14, 2014

Re Tim’s point on platforms, I think that is actually it: Facebook is not the same kind of medium. I use them for different things. I don’t use FB for friends-family primarily, but for talking in the halls of academia and around town … but I am on it in my own name. My blog is a specific project, and is different.

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Z

January 14, 2014

BUT I really object to Zuckerberg and his policies, and keep swearing I will quit Facebook because of them, yes.

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n8chz

January 15, 2014

This is many times longer than the original post, but I feel I must say it. I hope that is not a breach of netiquette.

For an intelligent person, Facebook is good for one thing, and as far as I know, only one thing. Unfortunately, for that thing it seems to be uniquely qualified, i.e. a monopoly. There are a large number of Internet users, perhaps the majority of Internet users over 35 or so, who think Facebook is the Internet, or at any rate who have not ventured much outside of Facebook. Combine this with the fact that Facebook is able to match people by alma mater, home town and the like, and it’s probably the only way you will locate your high school classmates online (or in some cases, anywhere). That affiliation-matching algorithm was in a website called Friendster* before Facebook even came out, but there’s something called having the right algorithm at the right time, and there’s also something called network effects, which is to say, Facebook today appears to perform a cybersocial function similar to that of AOL back around the turn of the century–people who are basically computer illiterate, who nevertheless have a computer or other device for net access, and are looking for an activity they can perform mostly passively, for the purpose of killing time. As with the AOL users of 15 years ago (who I’m guessing were mostly the same people) the activities in question seem to revolve around self-replicating messages, or chain letters, if you will. The “Facebook meme” phenomenon, while not (as far as I know) part of the AOL culture (I was never a member, but unfortunately I entrusted my email address to a few who were) is par for the course. It’s a way for people to communicate their political views by way of sound bites. I suppose some of these statements make a point, the first time I read them. I like the way Ricketson explains this phenomenon:

Please do not assume that I endorse the views of the following [blogroll]. I simply have them listed because they seemed likely to introduce me to something new and interesting. For instance, I am probably more “progressive” than “conservative”, yet I don’t have any mainstream progressive blogs listed simply because I am already familiar with their arguments and therefore am bored by them.

On the rare occasion I see something clever or witty or otherwise a deviation from the low signal-to-noise ratio of the Facebook “news feed,” I politely request the author to please, please post the content somewhere other than Facebook, if they don’t have a blog, perhaps as a comment on someone else’s blog. This is because Facebook is deep-linking hostile, and I need linkable cleverness for my quotebag series.

* This domain seems to be a gaming platform. Don’t know if that’s a change of ownership or just of business model.

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1. J. Otto Pohl
  
  January 15, 2014
  
  It is true that Facebook’s relationship with the rest of the net is basically incoming only. You can not export out of it. Kind of like the unique situation of Western Union and Moneygram in Ghana which is the only country in the world to have these two services only for receiving and not for sending money. So I can link to my blog in FB, but I can not link to something from FB in my blog. I have also noticed that if I link to a blog post in FB that people will comment on the FB link rather than on my original blog post. All of which has contributed to the decline of blogs since 2005 or so. There are some exceptions such as this one. But, a huge number have completely died, there have been fewer new ones to come about, a number like my own are basically “undead” in that they have an author, but almost no readership, kind of like most academic writing. FB and especially Twitter are inferior formats to blogs for making any kind of argument. But, they like list-serves and usenet groups in the past do at least involve some interaction between two or more people. Whereas for a lot of blogging it is like diary writing in the past, a largely solo affair.
  
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2. Clarissa
  
  January 15, 2014
  
  Very good comment, n8chz. Thank you! I often see that people have linked to me on Facebook and I get quite a few visitors from there. But I can never follow the link back and see who has mentioned me and in what context. It’s pretty annoying!
  
  “On the rare occasion I see something clever or witty or otherwise a deviation from the low signal-to-noise ratio of the Facebook “news feed,” I politely request the author to please, please post the content somewhere other than Facebook, if they don’t have a blog, perhaps as a comment on someone else’s blog”
  
  – GOOD!
  
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