To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers. —Jakob Nielsen —Write Articles, Not Blog Postings (Alertbox)
It’s been a while since I checked out Nielsen’s site. His overall point against blogs — which we can sum up in the old saying “nobody buys the cow if you give the milk away for free” — assumes that you’re in the business of selling cows.
Nielsen himself churns out an article about every two weeks, which he gives away for free. Usually the articles are self-contained, but sometimes they are a teaser for a full report, which he sells. Those reports are themselves teasers for his speeches and conference workshops, which are themselves advertisements for specialized consulting services.
I don’t disagree with anything he says… but I’m not going to stop blogging, because I’m not in the business of selling cows. I already have a job — teaching new media journalism and other courses at SHU. Were I in a publish-or-perish environment, I would have to make a lot of adjustments, not only to how, when, and why I blog, but how I spend my summers (in the library or at home with the kids?).
I have advised people who were thinking of jumping on the band wagon that if they or someone else in their organization doesn’t already love writing, or if they can’t hire someone with writing skills, it’s probably not worth it to add a blog. Yes, we need the one-in-a-thousand experts to lead the way (putting professional talents and R & D funds to work solving highly technical problems), but everyone is an expert in something — not always something that makes money. That’s OK.
The internet became the cultural force that it is now because geeks decided to give digital stuff away for free. They made tools with the idea making content creation easy, and they revolutionized society in the process. Without free digital culture leading the way, digital commerce would be nowhere.
So keep coming back here for milk. I’ll keep telling you where I’ve found good milk elsewhere. And if you’re looking to buy a cow, I’ll point you to ones that I think look good. I hope you’ll return the favor for me.
Yes, when I blogged this, I was definitely thinking of your ability to focus and manage your time. By offering to point people to where they can find cows that I think are good, I was indicating my willingness to participate in the information economy. I’m not against business, and I recognize that Nielsen’s audience is primary people who are involved in industry.
Bitter? No — I think he’s right, when you look at the issue from a particular perspective. And you’re right — I was overdramatic when I implied that the expected response to the essay is to stop blogging. Since I think of this blog as a research notebook, where I post reflections that I plan on returning to later, and where I enjoy investigating subjects by engaging with people who know more about them than I do, to shift this blog more towards a “publish a polished essay every two weeks” would change it so much that it wouldn’t be very useful to me.
Oddly enough, when I first started blogging, I wanted to publicize a growing bank of instructional handouts. I figured that if I kept updating my blog with interesting links, then when I added a new handout every few weeks, I’d have a readership. I continue to maintain a bank of handouts, but they’ve turned into a rather separate intellectual enterprise. I don’t tinker with my handouts for fun, but I do check my blog. Yet my handouts (including some that students wrote for homework) draw far more hits than my blog. (Well, there’s a long tail of handouts that nobody really reads.)
I have been thinking about beefing up my handouts in some areas, and when I do that I might post here a little less frequently, so I don’t mean to sound like I was rejecting Nielsen’s ideas. I’m still giving my handouts away for free, but when I put in the effort to create a well-formed handout, I can point to concrete benefits in my teaching from that for years to come.
WOW! Thanks for this link… I can tell it left a bitter taste in your mouth but Nielsen’s milk goes down smooth for me! This is something we’ve discussed and argued in the past. I think between your sentiments and Nielsen’s lies the truth. Balance is always best; it’s never a binary either/or situation. He’s not saying you can’t sell the cow; he’s saying you shouldn’t give away all the milk. As a freelance writer/creative writer, I do give away an awful lot on my blog and newsletter that I might otherwise sell as “commodity” elsewhere, but then again the ‘good stuff’ often gets reprinted and packaged in other media, and the sheer visibility of my blog has earned me incidental things, too. Some writers, like Cory Doctorow, give away the farm and then get book contracts out of it, but those are RARE cases…and those who have imitated the gimmick have mostly failed to get what they’ve sought out of it.
It’s not just about money, but about audience, and while blogging has a viral component, I think it can hit a ceiling in terms of a “return” audience or “regular” audience. I even subscribe to lots of RSS feeds, but don’t check them regularly enough to really think of myself as a ‘subscriber’.
I don’t think he’s saying you should stop blogging, but you’re right that he’s urging bloggers to not give away the farm. Perhaps you’re not selling milk, but you’re not just drinking it either — it’s more like you’re ‘reviewing’ it. There’s always an economy of some kind at work, indeed, and despite the free/open source ethic you’re subscribing to, just like a book reviewer is doing it for literacy but also selling books in the process, you’re helping others sell things too. You’re a part of that economy whether you like it or not.
(Quick example: a link to a youtube video that is a reenactment using legos…it helps advertise legos, in addition to youtube, if nothing else!)
So I think he’s raising a good point. Let editors pasteurize the milk; let publishers distribute the dairy in different packages; get the milk into new locations before it spoils, even if you give away samples on the roadside outside. It makes good pragmatic sense to me, and this seems like an excellent — if not imperative — issue to raise with your NMJ students, who are probably taking your classes with hopes to become milk farmers, too.