A stray thought.
Standard advice for bloggers starting out: Find your voice and stick to it.
But how many blogs or bloggers - or Twitterers for that matter - could you identify by the text of a single post?
Rarely do I visit individual blogs. What I have is a couple hundred feeds in Google Reader - organized and read by tag/folder. Which means unless a specific post really stands out and I star it, at any given moment I’ll know what but not necessarily who I’m reading.
As content aggregates, the more anonymous it becomes.
Voice is part of what makes your writing worth reading. Signal can make it instantly recognizable.
Ever read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court? There’s a passage where the narrator interrupts a story being told to him because he can’t keep track of the characters:
This is not good form, Alisande. [He] talks like all the rest; you ought to give him a brogue, or at least a characteristic expletive; by this means one would recognize him as soon as he spoke, without his ever being named… You should make him say, ‘In this country, be jabers, came never knight since it was christened, but he found strange adventures, be jabers.’ You see how much better that sounds.
That’s signal.
So it might be a trademark interjection, a standard sign-on or sign-off, or some other verbal flourish. Maybe it’s something you do not just on your blog but in commenting and such as well. No big idea here; that’s it.
But I’m interested in feedback - am I talking about a cheap trick? A self-marketing tool? Or something else entirely?
4 Comments
first post!
Rob you ass. Am trying so hard to sound serious here. Thanks for looking though.
I think this would be hard to pull off without being annoying. You could do something completely overt like Engadget started relatively recently by including a standard copyright-ish tag line at the end of every feed post that says where the piece was originally published.
Thanks Brian - I think you’re right about the annoying part, bejabers. Conversely I’m also annoyed by those copyright-ish tag lines.
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism (I think) does a good job at it - he has this pattern of using long blockquotes, interrupting the quote with comments, and prefacing those comments with, “Yves here. [His comment ensues.]” A completely insignificant but noticeable (and for me enjoyable) stylistic thing.