Been awhile
I'm vastly aware no-one/very few people read this... hence it is going to become way for me to organize and publish my thoughts, and work on communicating and recomending in a public forum.
However, I'm hoping to encourage readership in Spring and have something meaningful by summer.
Here's what that requires of me:
More effort
Consistant Blogging
Interesting Commentary
Spreading the word
Sometime soon after Feb. 1 I will be moving to a movabletype client hosted on my own website, at which point this will become more serious about the whole deal and focus on the goals.
Goals:
120 Posts between Feb. 1 - June 1
20 Articles, reports, summaries, etc. each of a minimum one page... of higher quality then the posts
Significant readership (I don't know what number is a good goal, I think 50-75 feels like do-able.)
posted by Tyler Willis @ 6:52 PM
1 Comments:
When I was doing Voice-Tel (which was a voice-messaging network), we found that there was an almost perfect correlation between account cancellations and voice message activity that dropped below a certain threshold (of about 1 message/day). That is, when message frequency dropped below 1/day, the probability of an imminent cancellation jumped to almost 100%.
Some research into what drove this was interesting: Unlike today's voicemail systems, where a stutter dial tone or a "message waiting" lamp on the phone indicated that a message was waiting, the Voice-Tel system required the subscriber (the person who owned the mailbox) to dial into a mailbox, punch in a pin code and see if there were any messages. If there were some, the subscriber could act on them -- take the info, reply, forward, save, whatever. If there were none, he'd just hang up.
If there were none, he'd also reduce the frequency of checking, because doing all that work (thinking of calling in, finding time to do it, dialing, authenticating and reserving time to deal with any messages that might be there) and finding "no messages" was a waste of time.
Occasionally, someone would leave a message for the subscriber, get frustrated when it took too long for a reply and then use another communication channel to get the response desired.
Occasionally, the subscriber would get an invitation the day AFTER the event because of his infrequent checking and he'd psychologically blame the system instead of himself.
So, infrequent checking fed a vicious circle whereby those who wanted to communicate with the subscriber would use OTHER means (and not our standalone voice message system), which led to more "no message" events for the user, which led to less reliability for the sender, etc.
Conversely, if someone has confidence, based on prior experience with the subscriber, that the voice message will be picked up within 24 hours, and if that's good enough response time for the purposes of the message, he'll use the VM system to leave a detailed message. (Some messages are better left by voice; some are better left by text; it depends on a number of factors which is better.) That leads to a virtuous circle, where the subscriber logs in, finds valuable information/messages and is thus "rewarded" and thereby encouraged to check frequently. Because he does, more callers will trust their messages to the system, confident the subscriber will check reasonably often.
* * * *
I think you had a good readership of your blog when you were in Europe, because you would post weekly-ish. I suspect that the vicious circle phenomenon described above began to set in when busy people (think Heather) got "mo message" results when clicking over to your blog.
You may think "but it's so easy to check. And what about RSS?" Well, even if it's easy, if it's a waste of time, the behavior will atrophy. And RSS is technically beyond most family members -- only Dave Glick and Caleb would use RSS feedreaders.
So, the good news is that your lack of readership now is a function of infrequent posting, not lack of interest or caring about you. And your goals for more frequent posting will cure the isolation because people care enough to try again and because they genuinely love you and are interested in what you have to say.
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