metrics Posts

• Social Class Jeanne wonders about class and race in the RSOF
  Of late I've been wondering about the connection between class and race in the Religious Society of Friends, but since I'm white, I don't feel like I have any authority on the matter.
  (tags: quaker quaker.witness)
• Obedient Linda on shisms, Baltimore and Friends United Meeting
  What if the indwelling Spirit IS calling us to join and mend the schism between us, but in that mending we must all call into question the very common habits of our everyday existence as Friends?
  (tags: quaker quaker.fum quaker.baltimore)
• Unafraid Angelina on dilapidated Center City
  I wouldn't be surprised if many are lost to the grinding wheels of development and the city looks radically different in ten years.
  (tags: comment)
• Light & Silence Simon on deification, Friends and Eastern Orthodox understandings
  The Orthodox emphasis on changelessness, going back to the apostles, and the Quaker idea of Primitive Christianity Revived may have brought them to similar places, however different they appear on the surface. (See his followup post for quotes)
  (tags: quaker quaker.christianity)
• Imperfect Eileen on blogging
  Robin’s question also made me think about the deeper issues of how we connect on the Internet and for what purpose... The main message [from a blogging workshop] was to link, link, link, both to other bloggers and to news sources.
  (tags: comment)
• Avinish K on measuring blog success
  The old school model of content creation, content consumption and content distribution does not apply to blogs.... I started with setting the context about why blogs are different and why they present a unique measurement challenge.
  (tags: tech tech.seo comment)

Over on Eileen Flanagan's Imperfect Serenity, there's an interesting post on blog publicity, "Blogging dilemmas," inspired in part by Robin M"'s recent "How did you get here?" post. Both bring up interesting questions about the role of blogs in community building and the location of that line that separates good blogging from mere self-promotion and pandering.

Readers will probably be unsurprised to learn that I use Technorati, Google Blog Search, etc., every day to keep track of the Quaker blogosphere. I act as a kind of community organizer and my searches are for interesting posts talking about Quakers (until reading Eileen's post I hadn't check my Technorati "rank" in months). Many people's first introduction to QuakerQuaker.org is getting linked from it, and I suspect I've accidentally outed a few beginning bloggers who hadn't told anyone of their new blog!

I have a professional blog on web design and analytics (with a somewhat off-topic but satisfying post on top at the moment) and separating that out has allowed me to use this personal blog, QuakerRanter, for whatever I like. Most regularly readers would say it focuses on Quakerism and cute kid pictures and while those are the most common posts, the most read posts are the minor fascinations I indulge myself with occasionally. Quaker plain dress is something I practice but don't think about most of the time (806 readers in past month). My wife and I love to bust on bad baby names and unfairly unpopular baby names (627 visits). I've also detailed some outings to semi-legendary South Jersey haunts (317) and score high on searches to them.

The conventional wisdom of the blog-as-publicity tool crowd would probably say these off-topic posts are distracting my core audience. Perhaps, but they're infrequent on the blog and long-lived on Google. Besides, I think it helps people to know I'm not just obsessed with one topic. Being a part of a real community means knowing each other in all of our quirks. I'm more tender and forgiving of other Quaker bloggers when I know more of their story: it puts what they say into a context that makes it sound more lived, less ideological. There's certainly good reasons for tightly-focused professional blogs (I'd drop Techcrunch from my blogroll if they started posting kids pictures!), but as more people read posts through feeds and aggregators I wonder if there's going to be as much pressure for personal, community-oriented blogs to be as single-minded in their focus.

We all have diverse, quirky interests so why not indulge them? I have seen blogs that try too hard to pander to particular audiences and boy, are they boring! A certain degree of idiosyncrasy and subjective orneriness is probably essential. Personality is at least as important as focus.

PS: I'm also interested in making sure I don't loose the core audience with all my side trips, hence the "latest Quaker posts" at the top of the page. I have at least one request for a Quaker-only RSS feed and will eventually get that going.
PPS: As if on queue, the next post in Google Reader after Eileen's is Avinish Kaushik's Blog Metrics: Six recommendations for measuring your success. Parts of it are probably a bit technical for most QR readers but it's useful for thinking about blogs as outreach.

Every once in awhile I get an indication that various "weighty" Quakers come to my "Quaker Ranter" site, usually because of a group email that someone sends around or a post on some listserve. What's fascinating is that few of the insider Friends ever spend much time looking around: they go to the one page that's been referenced and then--swoosh, they're gone, presumably back to their email or listserve. There's a profound lack of curiosity about what else I might be writing about. These institutional Friends never post comments and they rarely even send any feedback by email.

This contrasts very sharply with the bulk of traffic to my site. Dozens of people a day come in off a Google search. Unless it's a bad match, these seekers spend time on the site, clicking all around, following links to other sites, coming back, reading some more. Not everyone comes in via search engines: some follow links from elsewhere while others read the RSS Feed or just come in ever few days to see what's new.

Part of the difference between "institutional" and "seeking" users is in their use of search engines. Many establishment Quakers don't know how to use them or don't think to use them. A website marketing proposal of mine was almost nixed recently when a committee member learned that search engines bypass a site's homepage to return results from inside pages. I just assumed that everyone knew by now how a search engine works. I use Google dozens of times a day; it's hard for me to imagine anyone navigating the net without it. It must almost be like they're using a separate medium. Both of us are using the internet as transmission conduit, but that's like saying both a newspaper and a personal letter use paper and ink for transition: while this is indisputably true, it doesn't begin to speak to the different use and the depth of audience.

* * *

I wonder if the internet divide represents an even more significant divide between institutional insiders and the rest of us. The insiders might be staff, committee clerks or just very involved Friends but they share a certain way of understanding their world. First off, they have their ideas all figured out already. There's a lack of curiosity here. They aren't searching for new writers or new ideas. They will only consider something after some other Quaker institution has recognized it, a Catch-22 situation that the military refers to as "incestuous amplification."

Any project outside of the established recognition zone is invisible. Even ones that have become dominant in their field are acknowledged only begrudgingly. In the last ten years, Quaker.org has done more for outreach than just about any institutionally-sponsored program or committee. Yet I know of establishment Quakers who still think of it as an upstart, and truly believe their puttering about is more important, simply because their organization has been around longer. In truth, many Quaker websites get so little traffic as to be next to non-existent.

The insider's primary point of reference is institutions. Power comes from knowing how ideas, proposals and decisions flow through these organizations. A good idea is only good if it's made by the right person and vetted by the right small group first. Sometimes I'll hear of the gossip of some group scheming within some Quaker institution and I always have to laugh: like, WHO CARES? It's a small bunch of people scrambling over crumbs while the world ignores them. There's a whole other world of Friends and seekers out there building their own culture and connections, or trying to.

This Quaker Ranter site is primarily for those still curious, for those still interesting in building something real, for those wanting engaging conversation and stories. I actually prefer it to be a little bit "underground," unknown or forgotten by institutionalists, for I think there's discussions we need to have and the open internet is a good place for that.

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More

I'll be editing and adding to this post over time as I see more patterns of site use. I'm curious if others have seen surprising patterns of internet use. Oh, and by the way I should cop to being a Quaker insider myself, though I always try to keep the big picture (i.e., God and the Spirit's commands) foremost.

By Martin Kelley. How can we use online tools to measure the state of the Peace Movement?