The title of this post is not so much directed at the content of your blog posts (though this is of course important, as uber-blogger Karenne Sylvester would tell you).
Here I would like to address a commonly experienced feeling among education-related (often newer) bloggers that a post on a given day (or even in a given week) has basically failed and been swallowed up in the faceless Internet ether, because it didn't get a lot of hits or comments.
In fact, a lot of seriously good blog posts out there don't attract a lot of visitors and gather no comments at all - sometimes for a very long time. The inevitable reaction from a lot of bloggers appears to be that they are throwing minute feathers into a very strong wind.
Nobody is listening. Nobody cares. Why am I doing this?
If you're experiencing that sort of feeling as a blogger, I would like you to consider two things.
1. Why and what you blog is much more important than how many people read and comment on your blog.
A very articulate explanation about what I'm getting at here is available over on Shelly Blake-Plock's excellent Teach Paperless blog - especially the most recent post about Why Teachers Should Blog.
2. There is a very good chance your posts will find readers long after they've been posted.
Search engines love blogs. Their webcrawlers pounce on new posts quite quickly, and depending on how well you word your post titles, it can be surprising how far up in search results your posts may appear. I've written posts that got few initial hits and no comments at all, but a year later they are turning up on the first page of Google for search results tied to particular queries.
It's natural that bloggers feel motivated when they know their posts are getting readers, so it can be a good idea to use something like Feedjit to track visitors to your blog in real time. In addition to seeing which posts are getting readers, trackers like that can tell you where they are coming from and how they found your post.
Believe me, it can be surprising just how many readers end up on posts you wrote (and despaired over, thinking no-one gave a fat rat's bottom about them) months or even years ago.
There are also, of course, some serious caveats to that - especially if you tend to write with your heart on your sleeve or have a post that is a little less, shall we say, diplomatic? (And this blog can be a good example of that from time to time, but I figure you only live once and there's no point making every post a carefully guarded articulation you might come up with to avoid offending your future parents-in-law.)
In any case, my main points here are that your blog is you, warts and all, and not only is every post potentially highly valuable (in being an extension of you at a certain point in time), it also develops a long tail like a ribbon that stretches out into the Internet galaxy.
And you never know who might spot that ribbon further down the track and decide it is something they can relate to and learn from.
Basically, every blog post is a boomerang.
Some just take longer to come back.
Some come back and hit you in the back of the head...
Others come back with new friends and realisations attached.
:-)
