I don’t think it is quite all that bad if you view the point of the blog to influence yourself rather than the influence others, i.e. point #1 above. As long as you are learning new things and having fun, the relevancy of outside validation diminishes greatly.

Everyone wants to have large readerships, including myself, but you have to be honest with yourself and ask yourself whether or not you have anything important to say that others should take time to read? Me? I have very little important to say in educational law, but that doesn’t stop me from putting out a new post with a link to someone else that has something important to say every day or so.

Finally, you got to remember this is all relative. As academics, Scott & Jon, you put 100 or so hours into a peer reviewed article. Maybe that article gets read 100 times (if we are generous). If you put something in TCR you get more readers, but you also have to devote more hours. Same with book chapters, a little better for practitioner journals, and a little worse for grant writings. So, let’s just say that for every hour of work you put in, you get 1 reader, something not that far from a 1:1 ratio. So, it is like you are having a conversation in your office with only 1 other person each hour. As you become a more established scholar of course this gets better, but most of academia is probably functioning in a single digit ratio basis.

But, when you compare all of that academic writing to even a modest blog, that ratio of readers to time spent is very low for traditional media and very high for electronic media. Even this comment, which took me maybe 15 min. is probably going to be read 30 times or so, for a ratio of something like 120:1. Now, not all of our blog posts get read 120 times, but when you factor in the average ratio of time spent to readers, you are still going to get something over 10:1. So, compared to traditional media, as a young scholar, you just increased your readership by a factor of 10 … meaning that hour-long conversation you were having in your office above now has to be held in a classroom. Sure, Scott has a bigger classroom than me, perhaps even an auditorium, but I have a much larger classroom than my most of my educational law peers.

So, don’t forget to remember the relativity of it all. And … more importantly, don’t take it all that seriously. Just have fun.

Yes, blogging is super fun. As I said in my previous post, I’m hooked. And I understand the urge for more readers and more comments. Most of us get a thrill every time someone leaves us some feedback. We all want some interaction. But it’s tough to make happen on a regular basis.

Blog what you love. If you do it well, the readers will follow…

But, the main weakness I see in the learning community through blogs is the local building of a team. Maybe blogging and web 2.0 have a place in inspiration and sharing ideas, but when it comes to solving real problems and creating cultural change, I think that the power comes from local people who share the same roads, crises, shopping centers, schools, and challenges.

If you’re blogging to “change the world,” but you haven’t sought out the social connections in your local community, then you’re missing the most powerful resource you have. I’m just getting into blogging, but I already see that my real test will be using the local influence I have to make local and global change.

Part of the problem is its unlimited potential, so we all want to be famous overnight. Our typical introduction to Web 2.0 is not only Mike Wesch’s content in the videos, but also his 10,000,000 hits. Or your multimillion hit Did You Know series and we think … Wow! I too can change the world if I only dip my toe into this Web 2.0 thing.

Then we take the plunge and start a blog and no one shows up to read all of these cool thoughts we have. Even my colleagues at my own institution, the people I hang out with, don’t show up. It is like the Web is rejecting us. We try commenting more on other blogs. We try making the content more racy. But, aside from a few additional sporadic hits, nothing changes.

But, meanwhile, the content is building and our hits are slowing increasing. Maybe only from 20 a day to 26 a day, 15 of which are probably spiders. But, those spider hits are important. It creates the archive and the archive is just as important or more important than the realtime conversations we all want to have so badly. I know this because my colleagues, who have no realtime interaction with the blog, have come up to me and said “Hey, I saw your blog and you pointed me to a cool article, thanks.” I ask how they found it and they say, “Aw, it just came up on Google.”

So just because your blog is not turning into the realtime cocktail conversation that you thought it would does not mean you are not making a real difference in people’s lives — it just much more difficult to track that rather than the number that gets put in your face each day.

I just don’t want to scare people away from blogging because their hits are not meeting their somewhat unjustified expectations and experienced bloggers say, “that’s just the way it goes.” We need to remember the positives and not let our own frustrations about our page views or comment intensity cloud how we speak about blogosphere to others.

However, know that even if you are offering great ideas expressed in interesting and entertaining ways, it’s still likely to take time to build an audience. Months, probably years. And you may run out of energy before it happens. Or you may decide that the few people reading your blog really aren’t worth the effort.

Those prospects may very well scare some people away from starting the process in the first place. So be it. But remember, even if you only have a few dozen people in your community, it’s still a community that didn’t exist before you started. And those people must consider what you have to say worthwhile or they wouldn’t stay.