One of my New Year's resolutions for 2014 was to blog at a rate of at least one post/week. This is hard, particularly if I'm aiming for meaty, content-rich posts about my research findings. I have not, in fact, published many posts that would fit that description so far this year (the ongoing series of posts about my great-grandfathers' WWI service records being a possible exception, but those are not really the most meaty, research-y posts I've ever written). There were a few good posts about my research in the last half of 2013, when I was also aiming to keep up that posting schedule. (Examples include Finding Louisa and I think I just hit my first brick wall.)
However, in the past few months, I've also posted several of my most visited and most commented-upon posts of all time. These were a varied group, but most-visited included both Top 10 Halloween Costumes for Genealogists and Tutorial: Searching Fulton History, while most commented upon included John Joseph O'Hara's WWI Service Record and a Plea for Help and Mother Malone: Family History through Song. (That last one surprised me; I didn't expect it to strike such a chord.*)
There's not a lot of overlap there, between the posts that are about my research and the posts people most enjoy reading. The posts that attract the most readers are the most universal; they're not all about me, my ancestors, or my research. They are, at times, utterly absurd. (Top 10 Pick-up Lines for Genealogists? I did not exactly advance the scholarly conversation with that one!)
I've always conceived of blogging primarily as a way to organize and share my research, but that doesn't seem to be the type of blogging that is actually most successful with readers. When I first started looking at this pattern, I worried that I was writing more for other people than for myself. And yet, some of those more popular, less-research-based posts are the ones that I enjoy the most. Because, in fact, Top 10 Pick-up Lines for Genealogists was really fun to write!
Which means I'm left trying to figure out what exactly motivates me to write. Am I writing to improve and organize my research? Am I writing for fun? Am I writing for me? Am I writing for an audience? Am I just pointlessly rambling? I may have limited blogging time over the next couple of months, and trying to figure out what to do about it has me analyzing what I write, and what I should be writing. Do I stop updating, or do I make an effort now to schedule posts for the future? I've been aiming for the latter, but it involved producing content in a much more concentrated way than I ever have before, causing at least some of my soul-searching about what to write and why.
Why do you blog? How do you focus your content? Or do you just let the spirit move you?
*See what I did there?
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Monday, March 31, 2014
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Accentuate the Positives Geneameme - 2012 in Review
I didn't have time to do a year in review/resolutions post as 2012 waned and 2013 dawned, so I'm going to take advantage of Geniaus's most recent Geneameme and Accentuate the Positive:
Remember to accentuate the positive - please delete the statements that are not relevant to your situation.
1. [Some] elusive ancestor[s] I found [were] the Italians (I found a bunch, but they weren't particularly elusive, just on a line I hadn't explored before.)
2. A precious family photo I found was not a photo of my family at all. I found a photo of other people that identified the location of this photo of my grandfather, and thus what school he was graduating from. I'm planning a post on it, so I won't say more now.
4. An important vital record I found was Julia Mulvaney's death certificate. I didn't think it would be important, but boy was it!
6. A geneasurprise I received was finding out that my great-grandmother, known to all as Molly throughout her life, was actually named Anna.
8. My 2012 blog post that received a large number of hits or comments was On serendipity, and obstinately ignoring conflicting evidence - the above-mentioned post about my Grandma Molly. My actual post with the most hits was this one, for the 118th Carnival of Genealogy, but the CoG probably led to inflated numbers, so I won't count that.
10. A social media tool I enjoyed using for genealogy was Google+, not for research, but for connecting with and interacting with other genealogists.
11. A genealogy conference/seminar/webinar from which I learnt something new was The Genealogy Event.
15. A genealogy book that taught me something new was Brooklyn! An Illustrated History by Ellen Snyder-Grenier. (I'm reading it now, but I started it in 2012. That counts, right?) I recommend it highly for anyone with roots in Brooklyn at any point during its history.
16. A great repository/archive/library I visited was the Brooklyn Historical Society. I seriously need to get back there!
17. A new genealogy/history book I enjoyed was Hey America! Your Roots are Showing! by Megan Smolenyak, which I read on vacation soon after it came out. Very entertaining, but also a bit excruciating to read on the beach with no internet access, because it had me itching to renew my research exactly when I had no opportunity to do so!
19. A geneadventure I enjoyed was appearing on an episode of the Irish television show The Gathering, when my husband and I were interviewed about his ancestors, whose decades of correspondence can be found on our other blog, The Gleasure Letters.
20. Another positive I would like to share is that while posts on this blog have slowed to a trickle, that's mainly because I've been making a real effort for them each to be interesting, content-rich pieces, so I've been able to use my blogging to really help me organize my thoughts and my research and make connections I otherwise wouldn't have - and it's been pretty successful so far!
Remember to accentuate the positive - please delete the statements that are not relevant to your situation.
1. [Some] elusive ancestor[s] I found [were] the Italians (I found a bunch, but they weren't particularly elusive, just on a line I hadn't explored before.)
2. A precious family photo I found was not a photo of my family at all. I found a photo of other people that identified the location of this photo of my grandfather, and thus what school he was graduating from. I'm planning a post on it, so I won't say more now.
4. An important vital record I found was Julia Mulvaney's death certificate. I didn't think it would be important, but boy was it!
6. A geneasurprise I received was finding out that my great-grandmother, known to all as Molly throughout her life, was actually named Anna.
8. My 2012 blog post that received a large number of hits or comments was On serendipity, and obstinately ignoring conflicting evidence - the above-mentioned post about my Grandma Molly. My actual post with the most hits was this one, for the 118th Carnival of Genealogy, but the CoG probably led to inflated numbers, so I won't count that.
10. A social media tool I enjoyed using for genealogy was Google+, not for research, but for connecting with and interacting with other genealogists.
11. A genealogy conference/seminar/webinar from which I learnt something new was The Genealogy Event.
15. A genealogy book that taught me something new was Brooklyn! An Illustrated History by Ellen Snyder-Grenier. (I'm reading it now, but I started it in 2012. That counts, right?) I recommend it highly for anyone with roots in Brooklyn at any point during its history.
16. A great repository/archive/library I visited was the Brooklyn Historical Society. I seriously need to get back there!
17. A new genealogy/history book I enjoyed was Hey America! Your Roots are Showing! by Megan Smolenyak, which I read on vacation soon after it came out. Very entertaining, but also a bit excruciating to read on the beach with no internet access, because it had me itching to renew my research exactly when I had no opportunity to do so!
19. A geneadventure I enjoyed was appearing on an episode of the Irish television show The Gathering, when my husband and I were interviewed about his ancestors, whose decades of correspondence can be found on our other blog, The Gleasure Letters.
20. Another positive I would like to share is that while posts on this blog have slowed to a trickle, that's mainly because I've been making a real effort for them each to be interesting, content-rich pieces, so I've been able to use my blogging to really help me organize my thoughts and my research and make connections I otherwise wouldn't have - and it's been pretty successful so far!
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