causality

This post forms part of a series. Read the first installment.

Words: Pete Ashton
Illustration: Raymond Weekes

Blimey, I went off on one there. Sorry about that. You just want to know how you can use a blog to increase the audience and customer base for your creative endeavor and here I am wittering on about causality and intertwingularity and stuff. So let’s bring this down to earth with some real world examples.

Say you’re a photographer looking to develop your business in the area of portraiture and wedding photography. You’ve got a lovely website that shows off your best work and maybe even a section where clients and their friends and family can order prints online. Now, part of your appeal is your skill with the camera but another important part is your personality. You’re not just selling your art, you’re selling yourself.

Now you could have a page on your site with a biography but that’ll probably come all all contrived. What you want to do is talk to the potential clients in your own voice, telling them your story. A good example would be stevegerrarddiary.com where the titular photographer Steve Gerrard writes about the work he’s been doing. The hook is his jobs tend to veer between beautiful wedding shoots and dirty rock photography so each post will usually have a selection of shots from a couple’s happiest day juxtaposed with some hairy monster screaming on stage.

But that’s not why it works. What really comes home to me is how Steve’s character is brought out through the blog as he talks about his strange life. You feel like you know him and his family. Not too much, mind. He’s careful to keep the private private. But just enough that you’d feel comfortable asking him to record your wedding. At least I know I would.

Another great example is theblackapple.typepad.com, brought to my attention by Antonio Gould in is fifth New Media 4Cast for 4Talent. Here Emily Martin blogs about the stuff she sells on her etsy.com site. Etsy is sort of like eBay without the auctions and only for handmade items but while it’s great that you’re in a curated space (rather like, say, Camden market) it can be hard to rise above the crowds. You need to add more that just the details the site will let you enter. You need to add yourself. Emily does this brilliantly with her blog talking about the new products in her store, the motivations for creating them, and dropping in little nuggets about her own life. Again, nothing too detailed but enough that her readers can identify with her as an individual. And judging by the number of comments each post gets she’s developed a pretty dedicated community.

But there’s one very important thing that both Steve and Emily do that I haven’t mentioned. They both link to “the competition”, in Steve’s case other photographers he knows and likes, in Emily’s case other Etsy shops she buys stuff from. In a small way they’re setting themselves up as resources for their communities, partly because it makes sense to support your peers to build a sustainable environment but also because they’re human and that’s what humans do. And as other bloggers in their communities do the same the effect is quite dramatic as a network emerges that is structured and easily navigable yet always changing and evolving as people come and go. Nobody ever has a complete handle on what’s going on and no-one is in charge but it works.

< Week 3: everything is intertwingled

Next in the series: what about me? >

This post forms part of a series. Read the first installment.

Words: Pete Ashton
Illustration: Raymond Weekes

When you stick something on the Internet it becomes part of the network. If your something is a fancy looking website that has pictures of the stuff you do and not much else then sure, it’ll be on the grid but only in the sense that the Isle of Feltar is part of the United Kingdom. It’s there but it’s not exactly engaging with the bustling hubs of the country. Which is fine, if that’s what you want, but you might want a little more from your something on the Internet. You might want it to actually engage.

If you want to connect with the rest of the Internet a blog is probably the best way to do it. Part of this is the conversational tone I mentioned before but a huge chunk of it comes down to the humble link.

You’re no doubt familiar with Wikipedia - the online encyclopedia that might not be accurate but by God it’s useful. And you’ve probably had that experience where you look up something, say the Island of Fetlar (and, by the way, doesn’t that sound just a little rude to you?), and within four clicks find yourself reading about Genoa Cathedral. Or hermit crabs. Or melodic death metal. Or kittens. And it might seem incredibly random and at times absurd that these things are somehow connected. But they are.

Just as the multiplex nature of causality gives the illusion of free will so the complexity of the inter-linked Internet gives the illusion of random chaos to such a degree that it can be hard to see how you might engage with this. But it can be done. Once you understand, in the words of Ted Nelson, that everything is deeply intertwingled, then you’re on the road to getting it right.

< Week 2: the social internet

Next in the series: getting personal >