Yzabel / August 5, 2005

I wanted to test it first myself before writing about it here, but as this is now done, here’s a little plug for The Writers Blog Alliance, a project intiated by Clive Allen from Gone Away and given shape to by Deborah Woehr from The Writers Buzz.In a nutshell, the Alliance (still in its beta version at this point) is to provide a place where writers who blog can gather and get more exposure, instead of being drowned in the huge mass of blogs without any hope of getting above it due to the more technical orientation of the famous “A-list”, which members (like most of us, in fact) seldom link to sites outside of their range of interest; writers’ blogs are thus naturally “excluded” from it, and can’t benefit from the linkage it provides. In the words of Clive himself in his post , here’s a more precise description:

WBA began as an idea for increasing the visibility of writer’s blogs. It occurred to me that we are all in a race for traffic, the lifeblood of blogs, but we’re losing that race because our market is smaller than that of the big guns, the blogs on the A-list. In the blogosphere, success is measured by links; the top sites count their incoming links in the thousands whereas we think we’re doing pretty well if we get a hundred links. And quality of link counts too; if you can achieve a link from a blog on the A-list, your own blog’s importance (and traffic) will increase dramatically.The problem is that writers will never get links from A-list blogs; they deal in news and current affairs, oddities and gadgets, we provide good writing that does not depend upon the latest events (I know the journalist writers are an exception to that but they need to consider the toughness of their opposition – the A-list bloggers are entrenched). We’re in a bind: without links to high traffic sites, our blogs can never rise above the cacophony of the millions of blogs, to be noticed by our potential market; but none of the top blogs are ever going to be interested in what we’re offering. What we need is a few heavyweight blogs of our own to dish out links to us so that we can be noticed.

It’s of course hard to tell at this point how things will evolve, but all in all, the project seems to be starting off pretty well in my eyes. With a grouped effort, it can surely go evern further.Y Tags: writing | blog | community

Yzabel / August 4, 2005

This stemmed from the comments left on John’s entry Blog Tips for Writers, as I was wondering whether this should be left as “simple” comments or be worth a spotlight here. I decided on an entry here.A few years ago, when I was new and naive regarding the wide possibilities of Internet, I used to have my own website, and I used to publish some of my writings there, as well as drawings. Granted, it wasn’t anything terrific, whether regarding the web-design work or the translation of my texts, but it was there nonetheless. This beginner’s website is now long gone, dead and buried along with the server on which it used to be hosted; however, recently, I’ve started to toy again with the idea of translating a few of pieces and on posting them here.That’s when the fear started creeping in me—the fear of seeing my work stolen and used, just liked it happened on several art communities I’ve been on in the past, just like it’s also happening on certain blogs, whose unscrupulous owners simply copy and paste full posts from feeds they read and try to pass them for their own. The world wide web is just like its name indicates it—wide— and the wider a system is, the more numerous the chances of seeing this kind of theft and plagiarism to happen.I know that my current website still features several of my drawings (mostly vector ones now, as I’ve switched to this mode of expression over the past two years); I’m however careful to not publish usable versions of these pictures. They’re 72 dpi, they’re not printable due to the sloppy quality this would result in. Words, on the other hands? Words are easy to highlight and copy in a text editor, words are easy to grab—unless it’s just a part of a piece that gets published, but for short stories or on poems, what would be left of them if only publishing a tiny part online? What would be the point for the reader?Read More