Building a Better Blog Foundation with Aggregation

Over the past few weeks, Linda has provided explanations about various social networking tools and has provided a list or two of social networking platforms for designers and developers. But, what about your blog? Is it dead in the water, or should you make that blog the foundation of your social media tower? In this article, Linda discusses the answer and some ways to build a better blog for that foundation.

Aggregation and Your Blog

I'll take a wild guess and state that most of you who are reading this article have a blog and maintain it on a regular basis. Don't let all this talk about social media fool you – blogs are here to stay for a while, so don't listen to the pundits who have said that blogs are dead. I believe some pundits simply want you to disappear into the social media foray so your blog doesn't become competition for their pundit blogs.

Besides, if you drop your blog, where will other aggregates like Facebook and HuffPo find meat for their platforms?

What's the solution? Other writers have delved deeper and come up with some answers – the same answers that were provided by the clues in the Washington Post article: Become an aggregate, just like the big dogs.

For instance, Andrew Keen asked Hermione Way (London based founder of Newspepper and the presenter of Techfluff) about the death of blogs, and he responded, "Blogs will become aggregation points," or personal hubs. But, I will add that this will happen only if you have the time and energy to maintain a blog. By "maintain," I mean creating a blog, writing on that blog regularly to keep it updated, updating your blog platform to stay ahead of hackers and using a theme that won't be screwed by those platform updates.

Then, you'll need to spend time searching for material that is similar to your perspective (or not, to be controversial) and adding it to your blog. Then, you'll need to incorporate other bloggers who also want to contribute to your site.

Before long, you'll end up with a staff as large as Arianna Huffinton's team.  But, do you want that? Is there another solution?

One Solution

You can play it smart and try to build aggregation a bit at a time. This is not a race to become as large as Facebook or HuffPo. The only way you'd get to that point quickly is with a lot of money or with a lot of time on your hands and a very persuasive nature. And, you do not want to scam digital content from other sites and post it, circumventing the need for originality.

Instead, you want to blend both originality and other people's thoughts and works that highlight your perspectives and appeal to readers of like mind. HuffPo, for instance, uses original blogs from various writers and they write prologues to work done by other people on other sites as well as creating lead-ins for stories that exclude prologues. Here are a few examples of the latter:

The image above was extracted from HuffPo's Entertainment section on Sunday, 16 August 2009:

·         The story on the left about Madonna is a link that leads to a story about Madonna written by the Associated Press on Yahoo! News.

·         The story in the middle leads to a page on Huffington Post that is a poll with video images, linked also to Facebook.

·         The last news item about Jane Fonda links to Daily News' gossip section.

In all cases, comments about each story are "in-house." In other words, comments about each story are held and maintained at HuffPo. And, plenty of in-house blogs also exist, along with blog entries by Arianna Huffington at least twice per week.

Another example of a HuffPo story – and one that stirs my sense of what is great aggregation is all about – is the story that provides a lead-in before it takes you to another site or that uses material from other sites. You can find many of this type of example in HuffPo's political section. One example includes the article, "Obama Weekly Address Accuses Special Interests, Lobbysits Of Engaging In Fear To Stop Health Care Reform (VIDEO)," where a lead in precedes a video embedded from YouTube.

Don't allow HuffPo's site overwhelm you – take one page at a time, take notes and you may begin to see a method behind this aggregating madness. If you begin to employ one aggregating trick at a time into your blog, you may begin to realize how the links to other sites may increase your traffic, especially if you begin to Tweet your new entries or allow them to be added incrementally to your Facebook Page.