Users don't care about you

Jeff Atwood has posted an entry titled "Users don't care about you". I will use this soapbox to pick at a semantic nit and explain why not instead of trying to explain how to get them to care.

The reason is pretty simple (as all good reasons are in hindsight): they are users. There are no "users" reading my blog. There never will be. And this is really the crux of the whole revival-of-the-cult-of-personality-but-on-the-web thing. Unless your audience feels they have a personal relationship with you, they won't read your blog. I read all of my friends' blogs (if you are my friend and I don't read your blog, please send me a link to it). Why? Because even if the crap they write is boring, pompous, puerile, silly, humiliating, myopic and self-centered it's familiar crap. There's something about the odour that reminds me of that person. It's probably why you're reading this right now.

The majority of people writing blogs are doing it for their personal acquaintances. The "long tail" of blogdom is the really real world. You all know where I work, what I do, what my hobbies are and so on. Because you care about me. If you didn't, you wouldn't be reading this. What causes so many broken hearts (and wasted electrons) is that a huge number of bloggers sort of expect that they will clickety-click over to blogspot.com, tappity-tap to fill in the fields in the registration form, select a template, dash off an article or two on what they had for dinner and skyrocket to Number One On Google. Everybody wants to be the next Scoble (or whatever). Don't worry, the podcasters all want to be Adam Curry (much to Dave Winer's dismay); the real-estate agents all want to be Donald Trump; the investors all want to be Warren Buffet; the programmers all want to be Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds (depending on whether they want to be rich and famous or just plain famous).

Of course everybody wants to be just like those heroes and anti-heroes that epitomize and characterize their environments. That's normal. It's OK to wanna be cool. And part of being cool is being you. I know, I know, it's trite (oops, I missed that adjective up there in the rant about crap) but it's so true: who is Bill Gates like? Who did Michael Jordan copy? Do they have heroes? Sure! But they didn't rush out to try to be carbon copies of whatever they thought was the best thing since sliced bread.

I just watched a video of Seth Godin presenting at Google. In it he talks about making a remarkable product as being the first step in a marketing campaign. Of course, we're talking about blogs (or are we?) but the same principle applies: if you want people to make remarks and tell their friends to go and read your blog, you need to be remarkable. It's sort of like getting a girl to go with you to the dance in high school. You need to be remarkable if you want people to notice you. Truism after truism.

I would like to segue briefly here into a comment about attention. It's not enough to get attention, you need to get the kind of attention you want. I was talking to a friend recently and he mentioned that (verbally at least) I am able to hold people's attention for a lot longer than most. I credit this to the incredibly competitive environment at the dinner table in the house where I grew up. I am the eldest of three sons and if you are the eldest of your siblings, you know what it is to need to fight for that spotlight. I employ a range of techniques to keep people's attention and none of them involve brutally assaulting my listeners verbally or physically. I do things like only pausing for breath at a place in my sentence where I know that everybody wants to hear the end; raising my voice just enough to be heard and then lowering it again as attention focuses on me, rewarding my listeners by not continuing to bludgeon them with a loud, crass delivery of my idea(s); shifting my physical position to be in more people's line of sight or so that there are less obstructions between me and my listeners - every person in the vicinity not listening to me is not only not a part of my audience but may even begin to sabotage me by luring other listeners into separate conversations. What I'm getting at here is that throwing big temper tantrums and gesticulating wildly will make people sidle quietly away to talk to me until you are left with only the most spineless of people standing around you desperately trying to finish their drinks so they can escape to the punch table before you start another long-winded story. Or maybe that's me...

OK, so what's the bottom line here? Well, if you really want people to read your crap (I know I said I wouldn't explain how just why but this is my blog so...) they need to really know you. I remember when I first got into podcasting and I listened a lot to this one guy who was rude, crude and whose podcast was really just him blabbing around a couple of pieces of "underground" hip-hop and techno music. I fast-forwarded through the music. What I really liked about this guy was:

1. How raw he was: there was nothing polished about his performance (lots of "ums" and "ahs" and plenty of swearing), his podcasts (plenty of snap, whistle and pop) or his distribution (a simple RSS feed without much around it)
2. He came from Montreal (yay locals!)
3. He talked about the shit going on in his life and made me feel his pain

I identified, ultimately, with how crappy this guy was - there was something so human about it. Adam Curry, in contrast, with his silky voice (run through 18 compressors) and his trailers (recorded by adoring fans and mixed on donated software from companies hoping for a plug), seemed more of a confection than anything else.

So, at the end of the day I just want to read a blog, written by you, to me, for us and our friends. If you can slip in some stuff that only we know (it's like a club) or that I don't know yet ('cause I still like to learn - even when I'm killing time reading my friends' blogs) then that's a real bonus. But really, please, just be you and I'll be me, and hopefully, because we're friends, we'll actually have something to say to each other.

Update: After posting this I realized how huge that first item in the list is. This is both because I am being clever (see Ma, no hands) and because it is really the most important. I like it raw.