As some of you may know, I am an editor at pestaola.gr, a Greek blog with thousands of visitors every day. Like every other blog, pestaola.gr gives the ability to users to comment on a blog post. In fact, many people do and that’s great because it shows two very important things. First, it proves that the blog post is really interesting and second, it proves that your readers are not bored and are trying to get more information about something.

What really confuses me is the questions that sometimes are asked. And I will explain that with an example. Let’s suppose that there is a blog post about a new car. The article makes clear that the car is just a concept and it won’t make it into production. However, there is a user asking what the price will be.

So, either the user wants only a small part of information that he is too bored to search for (by reading the article) or, even worse, he is unable to proccess what he is reading. 

In the first case, I don’t really believe that there is a solution. I mean, blog post are not THAT long, most of them are approximately 200 words. Reading these 200 words, won’t take more than a minute. However, writing a comment will take you less than a minute. But you will have to wait until someone else will read the whole blog post and the comments and then decides to spend some time for something that is, at least, obvious. That, will definately take more than a minute. So, the person who wrote the comment will lose much more time than reading the post in the first place. Plain logic that, as it seems, some people don’t have.

In the second case, I think that there is a solution. And it is very simple in fact. Read carefully. By that, I don’t mean reading ten times a simple blog post, it may don’t even worth reading it second time. But once you decide to comment on it, make sure that you have completely understood what is written. As it seems, you are interested on that topic, so pay the attention you think it deserves the post and read it carefully. By reading an article and finally not understanding or realising what you have just read, you only lose time..

[photos via flickr.com, users p-m-m and margolove]

Some days ago, I started writing a blog post. I edited it like a million of times. I deleted it completely and then I ended up tweeting about that phenomenon. As it seems, many other bloggers face the same problem. It goes like that:

• start a new blog post -> don’t like it -> delete it -> start a new blog post

Cory Doctorow doesn’t seem to agree with that particular tactic. I am quoting him: 

Just publish and let comments do the rest.

Personally, I disagree completely. I mean, it’s ok to write a bad blog post if you think that is good, but what happens if you already know that your blog post sucks? Why let your readers down by delivering a below-average article according to your standards? Maybe some of your readers will find it “perfect”. Yeah, ok, but why are you blogging? For your readers or for yourself?

I strongly believe that a blogger is successful when he (or she) is blogging for him (or her). Writing comes normally, not because “I must write a new blog post”. Forcing yourself to do something you don’t really want, will have the exact opposite results from what is expected, a mediocre blog post that most of your readers will probably dislike. And when you write for your readers, that is even worse.

• bad blog post -> readers dislike it -> “I must to write a new article” -> forced blogging -> bad blog post

So, next time you have written an article, think twice before pressing “Publish”.

[Thanks to Nikos Anagnostou for inspiring me to write this article]

[image via flickr, user: cambodia4kidsorg]