Five Things Learnt In Three Days

It’s frankly embarrassing when you work all of a three day week, yet are knackered at the end of it. Yet, that’s how I feel as the end of my truncated week in Sutton’s infamous brown towers drawn to its close.

Stuff that’s been foremost in my brain over the last few days:

• You can’t over-emphasise the idea of community when telling journalists about blogging. And never mind how much you bang on about it, they’ll settle on comments as the community first, rather than understanding that this means interacting with other bloggers.
• There’s no good reason that the same contact-building skills journalists use in the physical world can’t work in the virtual world. It just involves creating the right synaptic path between the two ideas in the hack’s head.
• Your offline reputation counts for very little in the online world. You start building your credentials from scratch again.
• Blogs are often a slow build. They can take months to find their audience – often six months or more. This is hard for journalists used to tens of thousands of readers every week. Of course, they’ve never has any way of telling how many of those purchasers actually read their finely-crafted prose…
• The best way to get loads of traffic is to start an argument about which is better: dogs or cats?

And that’s me signing out from RBI HQ for the week.