Where Are All The Blogs?

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My wife recently quit her job. As well as looking for a new one she’s been delighted to have time to study and play at being a housewife, but above this she’s really taken to blogging.

I was happy about this, since I too enjoy writing blogs and thought we could make a hobby of it together, even though her blog is in Korean and mine in English.

As we began writing and posting together we noticed our blogs were getting similar amounts of views, and you may imagine how we quickly fell into a competition to see who would get the most views in any one day.

The winner would vary from day to day, with both of us occasionally pushing 100 views and my top count reaching as far as 160. A big number for me.

Until my wife suddenly gained 17,000 views in one day. She had somehow reached into the realms of viral phenomena and pulled out a winner, reaching a two day total of 30,000 views for one blog post.

Emjay likes to write about what she's been cooking recently!

Shocked by the unexpected interest she decided to do a little research about her own blog and discovered that once the post had started spreading it kept gaining momentum until eventually being picked out and placed on the front page of one of Korea’s search giants Daum, from where it exploded.

Thinking about and discussing this together we discovered blogging in Korean is a rather different experience to blogging in English.

The main difference we found was in how easy or difficult it is to find and read other people’s material. Specifically how easy it is to find Korean material but how difficult it is to find blogs written in English.

As a foreigner looking at Korean websites I find them really hard to navigate because they’re just so full of information. The blog hosting homepages are no different, and sport a crowded grid of links sending you to blogs about any interest you could care to name. This seems impenetrable to someone who still can’t read the language without concentrating, but to a Korean? A single click and you’re reading about anything you might vaguely find interesting.

Visiting the WordPress homepage is a very aesthetically pleasing experience, but you have to go a number of clicks to find something to read. As a result I find I don’t often read other blogs; when I have gone to do so I’ve found it quite difficult to find anything that interests me.

The only way to read blogs on WordPress is via the “Freshly Pressed”, “Read Now” or “Topics” tabs. Put another way, we can either read the cream of the crop as chosen by WordPress, or sieve through real-time lists of newly uploaded posts. While this often constitutes some interesting reading, they sit alongside each other as though every blogger should be aiming to progress directly from one to the other.

Rather than a celebration of good blogging this seems almost like a leader board.

Yes, these are today's winners but where can I find what's interesting among those 736,020 other new posts, WordPress?

What about the rest? Where is everything else that’s been written today that someone has found interesting? Is nothing outside of “Freshly Pressed” worth reading?

Freshly Pressed says “look at all the awesome stats and pretty blogs our website has. You want to be awesome too, right? We’ll help you get there”. WordPress’ own blog clearly encourages the same thing.

This isn’t a manifesto that makes me want to write well, to be creative or to join a community of bloggers. It makes me want to grasp for the chance to be famous – to have a readership.

Go and look at any Korean blog hosting service, however, and you instantly find a barrage of posts right under your nose, and you can almost feel the huge, active community at the tips of your fingers. It’s really easy to find things of interest and people who share those interests.

Even better is that I discovered that my wife has been using a service called “View On” hosted by Daum. This service aims to take blogs from all over the internet and puts them all in one place. If you opt into the service it doesn’t matter where your blog is hosted; if it gets views or recommendations it gets pushed up the page.

I was really impressed by the amount of sharing, commenting and writing for writing’s sake that this kind of integration and ease of access seems to foster.

While I’ve heard a lot about the great community of bloggers on WordPress and elsewhere it feels a little underground and hard to reach. If there’s so much great content out there spread over a number of blogging services then why not bring it together and celebrate it? Why not actually show people where these gems are hidden?

Even within the spacious confines of WordPress, why not actually show what people are reading and finding worth reading? Surely there is more that is worth a read than the championed blogs that form “Freshly Pressed”?

Why not actually show people where they can find blogs they will enjoy reading, and in doing so open up the blogosphere to those who aren’t yet convinced of how much good, intelligent and interesting writing actually goes on here?

The only risk we run is creating more and better blogs for ourselves to enjoy.