I joined the blog promotion portal Blog Explosion one month ago today. Blog Explosion is a place where you can promote your blog, meet new people, and get some good tips on how to improve your blog.
I had no idea how many visitors I would have after a month. I hoped for 1,000 and, as you can see in the image of my account below, my hope was more than doubled with 2,084 visitors and those numbers reflect only Blog Explosion visitors.
Forgive me for being Mr. Grumpy today.
Here’s a short — okay, it’s longish — list of things that make me grumpy when I read blogs of others and I realize 99% of what I say will insult 95% of the blogs I’ve read so far:
The tagline for this blog used to be just Rendering Meaning in the City Core and this week I changed it to read… Where Blood & Bone Render Meaning in the City Core …and some have asked why I made that change. I came to realize this week that a successful blog, if it is to have meaning beyond the self, must in some way speak personally to you, the reader, in a genuine manner.
Here are some tips on how NOT to write a blog:
1. Don’t Post for Days in a Row: No one is interested in what you have to say so why say it as often as every day? People don’t like an ongoing relationship so be sure to keep them at a distance with unpredictable posts. There is no better feeling than to read the same thing over and over. Leave it up to whimsy, instead of reliability, to find you.
2. Pick a Boring Blog Name: There’s nothing better for a blog than choosing a name that no one gets or understands. Be obtuse. Make no sense. Don’t use your actual name in any way because that would be too egotistical even though there is no better way to feed an ego and build self-importance than by blogging. Your name is not your brand you have not been building over a lifetime so why use that self-created goodwill in your blog?
The Peter Brooks ideal of an “Urban Semiotic” can be found in his fine essay The Text of the City (from Oppositions, 1977) where he defines “urban semiotic” as:
…a way of discovering, elaborating, the codes which would allow the indifferentiated surfaces of modern urban existence to reveal their systematic meaning….
This site was named Urban Semiotic over the more familiar “Urban Semiotics” plural because the singular “Semiotic” — unlike its plural cousin — is an adjective first and a noun second and I’m never bringing any of this up again!
David W. Boles’ Urban Semiotic is where Blood and Bone Render Meaning in the City Core.
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