I am flying at least once per month from Athens International Airport. What I am most happy about is the moment after check-in that I am diving into a bookstore’s International Press department. The magazine that I never miss is the British Car. As its title proves, it is a magazine about cars and generally about automotive news.
Some of you, may already know that I am blogging about cars in one of the bigger blogs in Greece, pestaola.gr. That means that I have subscribed in the most known web sites, both from Greece and abroad. I also have subscribed to some less known web sites. I get too many information from all these online sources. However, when I am reading Car’s latest issue I get all those *useful* information. Car has one advantage that I have not found (yet?) in any web site: every single car presentation has the right ratio of everything that is hidden under the “shiny new car”: technical stuff, market placement, journalist’s driving experience, even some times driving tips from the guy who actually tested and improved the car just before its launch (to name one, Walter Rohrl in every Porsche). If you add the great (love it or hate it) British humor in the equation, you can get the picture..
I don’t want to be misunderstood, web sites have all the information that I need to write an article but I have to read three or four web-articles before getting all the necessary information. And that’s ok when you are about to write an article, but what happens if you are just a car-enthusiast that simply wants to get all the latest information? Even in that web-driven era, certain things have not been replaced by the web. Will they ever be?
[photo via]
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]
