Observed

Technorati has a pretty good idea why we blog. Since 2002, the blog search engine has been tracking millions of blogs and social media worldwide.

I plan to have a big birthday May 12th.  (As a public service, here’s my Amazon Wish List.)  So, I identify with the blogging impulse identified by Kevin O’Keefe in his Why bother with a law blog? post yesterday.

For an answer, Kevin turned to Bill Gates (son of a prominent lawyer) and others.  He heard that at least some of us blog in order to leave a legacy.  In other words, it’s recognition that life is short and the written word is long.

No doubt.  A sense of mortality explains a lot of the choices we’ve been making every day for centuries…from child rearing to cave paintings and a lot in between.

If, however, you care to really know why people blog, ask Technorati.  It’s the preeminent blog search engine, tracking and analyzing blogs since its launch in 2002.  In 2008, it claimed to be following 112 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media worldwide.

Technorati’s go-to State of the Blogosphere reports that expressing a personal passion (such as a hobby) ranks high in explaining the urge to blog. So does seeking a connection with others — particularly if others are like-minded.  Conversely, making money is toward the bottom of the list.

On the other hand, a lot of us apparently blog to advance careers or to gain professional recognition.

So, Kevin’s right.  Leaving a legacy is part of the answer.  Maybe a big reason why we blog.

My sense, however, is that we all blog for different reasons.  Or, different shades of one or two big, virtually universal reasons.

Because after all, we never get any better than human.  Whether we blog or not.

Take a look at this infographic from Brafton’s Katherine Griwert.  It makes a compelling case for the importance of quality content to drive organic traffic.

The trick is in defining quality.  Google’s Amit Singhal and other experts aren’t quite as clear on this point, except to say that the search engines are looking for sites that create a “positive user experience” and that the path to that is through quality content.

In a nutshell, that means copy that’s engaging and that gets to the point.

What I offer my Web content clients is that search engines like the same things that people tend to like.  So…

• Keep things short.  250 words is plenty long for anything you might call a page.
• Use bullets, paragraph breaks, bold type and other formatting tools to break up your text.  If it looks long, it won’t get read…much less remembered.
• Headlines and subheads are huge.  Think of them as if they’re billboards…and your readers are moving 80 miles per hour.
• Tell your story.  Readers come to a professional service provider sites to find someone who a) can fix their problem, b) make their lives easier and c) clients will like working with.  Consider deploying brief client success stories, what you do other than work and the like.
• Face the client.  Make your copy about your client whenever possible and NOT all about you.  Not only is client-centric content more engaging, but it will set you way apart from your competition.

See?

PS:  A tip of the hat to Larry Bodine for posting this story.

A tech novelties article caught my eye the other day.  I found Anne Eisenberg’s coverage of on-line dictionaries (think Worknik) fascinating for how it reminded me of the humanness of language.

(It also hit me that the editors of The New York Times placed an article about words on the Business page.  Yeah, I know, it was really a tech piece.  It also underscored — in my mind, at least — the importance of good writing to good business.  Just saying.)

I noticed the tension between Web purists like Wordnik’s founder, Erin McKean, and Old Schoolers who admonish writers not to lean too far into the Internet.

Example?  Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, likes Wordnik’s oceans of words and word associations.  On the other hand, Nunberg says,

“The idea that you can pull lexicographers out of the loop and have an algorithm to mediate between me and the English language is goofy.

“Without hand citations done by trained people, you get a mess.”

Then again, Wordnik (launched in June 2009) has raised almost $13 million in VC so far and has business partners on the hook.  Somebody’s leaning.

New York Times auto writer Lawrence Ulrich sights a Buddhist monastery and sees a connection to how the new BMW 6 Series handles on the winding ocean-side roads of Northern California. Does this willingness to take chances with storytelling suggest anything for the way we handle marketing content for professional service providers?

So, OK, I’ll admit that a journalist covering the auto industry isn’t exactly analogous to someone writing for business readers.  The keyword here, however, is exactly.

Because Lawrence Ulrich has something to offer those of us who order, create and approve content for law firm Web sites, client brochures and such.  As auto writer/critic for The New York Times, Mr. Ulrich takes a technical subject that’s part of everyday life and makes it come alive.

Decide for yourself.  See, for example, whether the wit and intelligence in this piece about BMW’s new 6 Series doesn’t suggest how your looks-and-sounds-the-same-as-everybody-else’s content might acquire some zing and become more engaging.

I could go on and on.  Of all of the things I like about this article, here’s a passage that made me laugh out loud:

With both of those optional onboard systems, along with chunky 20-inch wheels and tires, the 650i felt unflappable along Route 301 near Carmel — almost an affront to the nearby Chuang Yen Monastery, whose Buddhist monks might take one look at the lavish BMW and advise, “Peace comes from within, do not seek it without.”

Yes?

Even though it’s Christmas Eve, there’s no need to get all Trinitarian on you.

Nevertheless, I’ve found the third member of my Holy Trinity of writers at The New York Times, my principal source of news and of seemingly never-ending writers delight. Before I confess my crush on essayist-critic Ginia Bellafante, let me tell you about the other two.

A part of me wants to be Bill Cunningham when I grow up.  I mean, wouldn’t you like to spend your days riding around Manhattan on your bicycle or attending swanky parties, taking pictures of the beautiful people and writing all of it up once a week or so?  Then again, I’ve seen the bio-mentary of Mr. Cunningham.  Which is when another part of me kicks in…the part that isn’t fond of the idea of spending most of my adult life alone, riding my bicycle around Manhattan taking picture of the beautiful people.

While it’s a close call, Gail Collins gets the nod over Maureen Dowd.  Both write like dreams, can snark with the best of them, and lean way far to the left.  Ms. Collins, however, hails from just up the river from me, in Cincinnati, and got her start as a reporter in Northern Kentucky.  Maybe she represents the hope that I might actually amount to something…someday.

Ginia Bellafante

I could (and do) read Frank Rich, Frank Bruni, Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristol, Roger Cohen, Matt Bai and other NYT writers just about every day.  Yet, there’s just something about Ginia Bellafante that I simply adore.  Maybe it’s her beat — New York City — which showed up about three months ago in a column entitled Big City.    In it and elsewhere, Ms. Bellafante shows that she has the perfect eye and ear for a Gotham where Gatsby meets Bonfire.

Maybe it’s her pen.  Which often reminds me of Hunter Thompson’s weird and wild rantings…without the Bourbon and mushrooms.  To wit, a paragraph from her Dec. 16, 2011, piece about the wedding of Jacqueline Schmidt and David Friedlander, a pair of mid-30s New Yorkers who wanted their union to be “about the world of creativity and social purpose that they inhabit.”  The venue was the PowerHouse Arena, “a loft-like store for arty bibliophiles” in the city’s Dumbo district.

Ms. Schmidt, who once served as the creative director of Moomah, the children’s cafe in Tribeca that caters to parents in denial about some of the distasteful aesthetics of child-rearing, made the cards in her favored style of heavy stock, neutral paper and quaint typefaces. Through her company, Screech Owl Design, Ms. Schmidt makes beautiful, twee paper products that would seem to demand an existence inside a Miranda July snow globe. Synergistically, PowerHouse is among the many places where Ms. Schmidt’s work is sold.

See what it mean?

Dave Barry takes his readers on a little journey through the cornfields and bureaucracies of Indiana, where the citizens of Dana are battling to honor the life of one of their native sons, Ernie Pyle. It's too bad that so few of us recognize that name -- or the name of his gifted contemporary from Paducah, Ky., Irvin S. Cobb -- much less have read anything they wrote. That's our loss.

Do yourself a favor.  If you want to see how it’s done, check out Dave Barry’s solid little story about legendary WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle and Dana, Ind., the hometown town struggling to keep Mr. Pyle’s memory alive.

Consider, for example:

Dana is learning the familiar lesson that the famous are not forever so; names slip from collective memory, to be replaced by other names also destined for the tip of our tongues, and then gone. Who remembers, say, Wheeler and Woolsey, the wacky comedy team of the 1930s; or Irvin S. Cobb, a cigar-chomping humorist as well known as Will Rogers in his day; or the Dionne quintuplets, international sensations.

But Ernie Pyle was not just famous; he mattered.

Not too much.  Not too little.  Mr. Barry sinks his hook in the first sentence and keeps you caring about the Hoosiers with the big hearts…all the way to the end.

He gets out of the way.  No dazzling distractions.  No lofty arguments or self-important bloviations.

Just good, solid writing, worthy of Mr. Barry’s subject.

Praesent in multis potuit paucis? (Or...Why use a few words when many could do?) I wonder how much lawyers' love of Latin has to do with the hunger for academic respect that influences so much of their law school training. Or, with the powder-wigged, Boswellian affectations that characterize the case law they studied?

Take a peek behind the curtain of law school training in today’s New York Times.   In it, reporter David Segal outlines the failure of legal education in the U.S. to prepare lawyers to practically earn their keep.

The piece made me think about what might inspire the florid written wordiness I so often see from lawyers, even in non-legal business development content.  Could it have something to do with the obsession of law school professors to be taken seriously in academe?  Or, with the hidebound, 18th and 19th-century (and earlier) case law that still comprises so much of what law students pack into their brains?

Is the use of Latin, hallowed despite its death (or, perhaps, because of it), another way of compensating for the profession’s inferred inferiority.  Is Latin a way for lawyers to prove they they deserve to be taken as seriously and respected as much as, say, physicians or clergy?

Mr. Segal reports that the winds of reform are gathering, offering hope that law student loans and other wrongs will be blown away.  Maybe these fresh breezes will arrive with copies of Strunk and White.

Blogger Steve Coomes might say that PETA's proposed McDonald's statue for downtown Louisville was DOA.

I’m no genius, but I’ve been around this game long enough to recognize a red herring when I see one, and that decoy story looked a lot like a chicken.

That’s how blogger restaurant blogger Steve Coomes wrapped up his post in today’s InsiderLouisville.com about KFC’s change in marketing chiefs.

You may have noticed Mr. Coomes’s  use of  metaphors.  Well, these were just two of at least a dozen metaphors and other analogical usages…in a 700-word, 20-paragraph piece.

Writing Tip of the Day:  Don’t do that.

Some people mean more together than they do apart, whatever the stage. Churchill and Hitler. Bogart and Bacall. Ali and Frazier.

Writers want to engage, not distract their readers. Dave Anderson may have done the latter with his use of a much-hated name to make a point in his article about champion boxer Joe Frazier.

This is the lead in Dave Anderson’s farewell to Joe Frazier, the heavyweight boxer and former champ who died of cancer Monday night.

Did you notice the name in the second sentence?  Did you react the way I did?  With puzzlement?  Wondering why Mr. Anderson reached for such an inflammatory name to engage his readers and make a point about synergy?

Instead of being engaged, the analogy distracted me.  If I had been looking for a third pair for that match, I would have kept my distance from naming mass murderers.

But, hey.  Maybe that’s just me.

When I step into the room created by social media, it's incumbent for me to stick around for the conversation...particularly when I start one myself. In other words, I shouldn't shake your tree if I don't want your peaches. No?

LexBlog’s Kevin O’Keefe wasn’t the only reason going to Boston for most of this week was worth it for me.  But he was a big reason.

Kevin, Igor Ilyinsky, Deb McMurray and other law firm marketing thought leaders were presenting at the annual conference of the LMA New England Chapter.  A couple hundred marketers and vendors met to talk about this year’s topic — the interface between lawyers and technology.

When Kevin moderated a panel on social media, he reminded me of why I still resist Twitter.  It’s because I already feel overwhelmed and over-connected.  Despite the filters and other settings I can use to configure who and what I follow (and vice versa), it just seems like another case of being careful of what I ask for.

I also get what Kevin says about the risks of being technically clever and merely auto-Tweeting new blog posts.  (more…)