Just Causes? (Or, We've All Got Issues)

Hi folks -- in my Journals
Anniversary badge entry, I got a comment that pretty much took me to
task for mentioning a Journals Anniversary feature, the J-Land
Pet Memorial Journal, but then not also highlighting Our
Beloved Angels, which is a pet loss support and pet prayer
circle blog.

I don't mind criticism. But it got me
thinking.

I get a lot of requests
to feature people's blogs, every day. Some of them are just regular
people's personal blogs, from folks who just would
like some more visitors.

However, some of
the requests come from folks blogging for a particular cause, agenda or
issue.

There are a lot of causes
out there.

Some are good; others... not so much. I
try not to judge the individual merits of someone's cause, though
I will say that having a clean, coherent, legible, literate and currently-updated
blog will go a long way (and not just with
me).

Causes that folks are passionate about come
from all over the map; some are for special events, like 9/11
Victim Memorial Bloggers. Others are for ongoing efforts,
like reform
of the San Diego Juvenile Justice
System.

There are Prayer
Rings.

There are also people fighting
persecution, solicitations for charities, seekers of missing children,
victims of crime, conspiracy theorists, political crusaders from across
the spectrum, proselytizers for religions big and small, advocates for
every disease and medical condition you could ever think of, and people
laboring against injustice of every stripe.

(We're
all doomed, by the way.)

Oh, and
petitions. Don't forget
petitions.

Now, please don't get me wrong: I'm not
trying to dismiss people, or the causes they're passionate about. And
I'm not trying to paint people with the same brush. People are also
looking for all sorts of different things when they send me their blog
to look at. Some are just looking for a few extra
eyeballs; other folks are convinced that if they get their
cause out in front of enough people, things will snowball, public
opinion will be mobilized, and wonderful things will
happen.

As a programming person, Lord knows that
I've seen (and I admit it, pitched) more than a few projects -- some of
dubious worth -- that we very earnestly felt would take off if we
just got it in front of a few million people on the
Welcome Screen or something.

The cool thing about
all this Web 2.0 and social media noise is that it isn't all about
using a shotgun, mass audience approach to try and cover as many people
as you can, hoping you hit a fraction of a percent of interested people.


Instead, we have the opportunity, using tools like
search, tagging and, most of all,
finding like-minded people (in blogs, boards, forums
or whatever) and really engaging them to try to
build a constituency for whatever it is we're doing -- promoting a
cause, or just trying to meet a few other cool
people.

Anyway, all that's just a lot of sound and
fury, signifying nothing (or in my case, a long-winded
apologia for why I haven't put your cause blog out
in front of the world, using the awesome powers at my disposal, which,
trust me, aren't all that awesome).

I'll still be
highlighting people's blogs and Journals, and we're always working on
new ways to feature people's blogs. And I promise that if you send me a
blog to look at, I'll look at it -- after all, that's part of my job.
However, I make no guarantees after that.

Just
please keep in mind that, just like there are a lot of sets of eyeballs
out there, there's a lot of content and causes out there, too.


(Heck, maybe we take one day a week and just bundle up the random "promote my blog" requests and put them out there, with
no guarantees of anything. The problem with that, though, is that the value of doing it could get diluted awful quick.)

Fortunately, there are a lot of different methods
to get your message out, too, and most of them don't depend on some
knuckle-dragging, stick-in-the-mud information gatekeeper like
me.

Thanks --
Joe

Tags: advocacy
blogging, apologia, getting more
readers, cause blogs,
building an
audience, promote my blog