I started Frankly Curious back on 10 November 2009. It was intended to be a blog about nothing in particular. I thought that I was such an interesting guy that people would just find whatever I had to say on a subject fascinating. But over time, I found that my interests could largely be found in four areas: music, film, religion, and especially politics. From the start, I tried to limit my writing about politics. This was mostly because it came so naturally to me. Whenever I wrote about politics, I thought I was slumming. Over time I gave into my politics obsession because people generally liked what I was writing and then other sites started linking to my political articles. No one was linking to my many articles on Don Quixote.

This represents the 2000th article on this blog. (There are more on the site generally. Curiously Clever currently has 113 articles.) And it is interesting to watch how the blog was changed over time. In the first year, I posted 151 articles. And many of these were very short—what I would later use footnotes for.[1] That is fewer articles than I now normally post in one month.

There have been other changes. The average length of articles has gotten longer. I used to write articles in the 400-600 word range and now it is more like 500-700. And that is indicative of the whole process. As good a writer as you may start out as, you end as a much better writer. When I look back at the work I did in the first year, I am underwhelmed. It isn’t that the work is bad, but generally things that I was very proud of at the time seem no better than my current Nighttime Cold & Flu addled ravings.

I think when a person starts a blog, they figure they have something to say. If they stick with it, they will find that there is a feedback loop. The more they write, the more there is to write about. And this is the key: the writing becomes more interesting. My great concern is that I’ve played this out: that I’ve taken the format as far as I can. And I think about this a lot. I can continue doing what I’m doing and get marginally better at it. Or I can change it, add to it. At this point, I don’t know what that might be, except that I would like to do more video.

But for now, this is my 2000th article. Stay tuned!

[1] Like this. In the old days, it would have been a link to another page.

I’ve come to despise the “nofollow” attribute of links. When a link includes rel=”nofollow” in it, search engines are not supposed to follow the link or use it to increase, for example, the linked page’s Google ranking. The idea originally was to reduce spam. If spammers knew that their useless blog comments wouldn’t increase their ranking, the theory was, then they wouldn’t post useless blog comments. Boy did that not work! I have 4 levels of spam protection on this website and still I have to hand delete between 5 and 50 entries per day.

Unfortunately, few people seem to have noticed that the “nofollow” attribute is useless. Go to just about any blog and leave a comment with your website address. On almost all sites, the link will be displayed with a “nofollow” attribute. To me, that’s mighty un-neighborly. I like it when people comment here. The least I can do is admit that my blog is in fact linking to their sites. It makes me think of neighborhood girls when I was 12 who told me to pretend I didn’t know them when alpha boys were around.

Of course, it isn’t that most bloggers feel this way. I suspect that very few of them even know what the “nofollow” attribute is, much less that they are using it. But most blogging software adds this attribute by default. Thankfully, the software I use (Nucleus) does not do it by default. But when I added BB-Code, it added “nofollow” by default.

I have two points in writing this. First: you should know about “nofollow” and remove it from your blog if you have no reason to use it. Sometimes there is a reason to use it. Earlier today, I added a “nofollow” attribute to the link to TeaParty.org, because they annoyed me so much. But if you are automatically adding it to all comments on your site, you might want to give this some thought. This is especially true if you approve all comments.

My second point? You are welcome to comment here; we won’t treat you like a trespasser. (At least, not after we approve your comment!)

I’m not feeling much up to writing right now because the right side of my face has swelled up owing to mostly likely about $700 of dental work. Luckily, ibuprofen works really well. Anyway, that’s why I am not posting today and probably won’t post much tomorrow. But I do have something on my mind: comments.

Mad Kane once mentioned to me that no one reads anything any more; they are in too much of a rush to write things. To that, I would add: mostly things that don’t need to be written. I get as caught up in this as anyone, except that I do little but read. I tend to think that is what I do for a living.

What bugs me about blogs is that most bloggers don’t interact with their users. Here I’m not talking about people writing for Daily KOS or other high traffic websites. Those sites already have a critical mass of readers so that the comment sections are self-sustaining. But most smaller sites make no effort to cultivate comments.

I was thinking about that this morning while reading Evil Slutopia, The ESC’s Guide to Social Media: You’re Probably Doing It Wrong. In the article, they suggest interacting with people who follow you on Twitter. This had never occurred to me, but then I’m very new to and ignorant of Twitter. But this is exactly my idea on blog comments.

In at least 90% of all cases, I respond to comments. There are a number of reasons for this, but the biggest is that I want my readers to know that I care that they are around. There aren’t many advantages to having a small blog, but one advantage is engagement. As a result, I’ve had a number of interesting comment conversations where they are more interesting than the original article.

I’ve made this analogy before: a blog is like a small business. There are roughly two ways you can treat the customer. You can think that what you have to offer is really great and people will come despite bad hours, inconvenient location, and nasty clerks. Or you can think that what you have to offer is okay and you really ought to work to make the customer’s experience as good as possible.

I know what my choice is. I think that no matter what it is you do, you win over readers one at a time. The idea that you will get a large following solely on the basis of your personal awesomeness is probably fanciful.

Something went very wrong when I wrote about Moe Tucker, the mediocre drummer for the Velvet Underground, and how she had become a member of the Tea Party. It has brought out a lot of loons—non-regular readers who come to the site somehow (not from search engines as far as I can tell). Mostly everyone thinks that I’m just so mean to poor Maureen. One commenter was smart and even insightful. But the others are just garbage.

I like it when people disagree with me. This is one way that I learn and grow, because (Shocking!) I’m not always right. But most of these people are just yelling at me—they have no point other than that I’m wrong and an asshole. One commenter was upset at my “foul mouth” and called me a “parasite.”

From time to time, I am an asshole on other people’s sites. It doesn’t happen often and the last time I did it was probably two years ago, and even that turned into a good and productive exchange. So I understand that people have bad days and say things that they would not an hour later. But the harshness of these attacks makes me think these are intolerant people who shit on me and my site and move on with their webwide fertilizing project.

I wonder what to do about these commenters. I could just deny them, but that seems like it gives them too much power over me. I could continue to respond, but there are two problems there: the fucktards don’t deserve it and it is emotionally draining. I’m especially not up to being emotionally drained. I visit a lot of websites where people say things I disagree with—that’s how I keep myself intellectually honest. But I don’t post incendiary comments. I don’t go to libertarian sites and yell at the owners about how only assholes are libertarians.

A website is like a small business—a bakery, say. Anyone is allowed in my bakery. But when a person comes in to scream about how I don’t know anything about making cookies, they have broken the implicit contract we have. The deal is that you come in, you browse the cookies, maybe you buy them or maybe you tell me that you don’t like them. And that’s it. Now, if you think the guy behind the counter is a loud mouthed asshole, don’t come in the bakery. I don’t visit Bill O’Reilly’s bakery. (And you shouldn’t either; his cookies have worms that eat your brain—really!)

I suppose I am over thinking this. These people could just be having a bad day, in which case I understand—no foul. Or they could be, as I said, webwide fertilizers. In that case, I just need to treat them as the other major nuisance of website management: spammers. Both groups are made up of assholes who don’t care that the little reward they get from soiling my website is far outweighed by the harm done to my website and its readers.

The customer is not always right!

John Scalzi at his Whatever Blog has a great flowchart explaining who gets to be a dick on his website:

I would create something similar, but that isn’t the way it works around here. In general, anyone can be as big a dick as they want. I just don’t have enough people commenting to complain. In fact, I love it when someone yells at me.

As I was preparing to post this, Rafael yelled at me about being mean to Moe Tucker and more generally The Velvet Underground. This is strange, because I love the band. Some people are such big fans that they can brook not even the smallest insults. Thus, I believe it is with Rafael. Here’s a taste, but check out the whole thing along with my response:

Who gets to be a hypocrite on this website? I do! I alone! Ha ha ha ha!

Update

John Scalzi’s comment policy is very funny. Check it out.