The Reader Appreciation Project

Every week you spend hours reading posts and emails from people who are telling you what they want. Bloggers also do the same thing through their blog posts, telling you what they want from you. You, as a blog reader or commentor, have to tell the blogger what you want also. People cannot guess easily what you have in mind. Even if they assume something, they may not act upon it as they do not know whether or not their guess is correct. Tell other people, including bloggers, what you want if you want something.

There is a difference between telling someone what you want and demanding something from someone. Usually, people who tell someone what they want end up getting more things compared to people who expect or demand things. You have to work for something and you have to tell others what you are looking for. The simplest form of such work is to simply voice out your desire. On blogs, it is one of the crucial things in order to get something from a blog or a blogger.

The same way blog readers do not know what you want unless you tell them, bloggers do not know what you want unless you tell them. It is time to speak up.

Tell bloggers what you want!

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Hurricane Katrina brought a real disaster to New Orleans and surrounding areas. People who survived it found themselves in the situation of not having anymore house to sleep in, no more clothes to wear, and so many times, no more family, or even no more life.

But as the human brain is set to forget, after a while people came back to New Orleans and tried to re-build their lives on the ruins of their old ones. Some of those people are bloggers. Maybe you’ve read their blogs many times without knowing that they were running away from the hurricane as they were writing those posts.

I was thinking the other day at a friend of mine, who’s working with me on an internet project, and who excused himself to be late with some things because he had to prepare for the hurricane. I’m fortunate to live in a blessed area, with moderate climate. The biggest wind I’ve ever seen was barely able to put down a dead tree. I think that if I had to face such a disaster, survival would have taken the first spot in my priorities (and the next ten spots on my priorities list would have been empty).

Today I discovered that there are people like PB, who after surviving Katrina, is now running away from Gustav, and meanwhile he still finds time to make a video post. Unbelievable, while being away, he’ll have to pay some $300 a night (or $100 a night) for the hotel room, as far as I’ve understood from his video. Again, I don’t get this democracy which cannot find a solution for lodging these people who were terribly hit by Katrina and who are in danger to be devastated again, this time by Gustav. Why do they give names to those storms? Only to have somebody to blame it on for so many deaths?

I’ve never read PB’s former blog (which he recently sold), but I cannot stop myself from thinking that maybe other bloggers I read are in the same situation. What I know, is that there are bloggers who pray for PB and for all other people in distress.

I surely hope Gustav dies young. Do you?

When we think of readers, we immediately think of commenters. Then we look at our stats and see that there are way more readers than commenters – a ratio of 500:1 is not uncommon at all. So who are our readers?

There is a set of people whom we often do not identify as readers and yet we know so much about them. Those are the bloggers who link to us. I suspect subconsciously we do not think of them as readers; we slot them into the category of “fellow bloggers.”

But how lovely when they appreciate and acknowledge us! Just this morning, after posting our latest edition of Canada 9-5 – a blog carnival for Canadian business bloggers – we received a little comment from Evan, one of the people featured in that post. Believe it or not, when I saw his simple, brief note of appreciation first thing after waking up – it made my morning!

So, yes, I’m linking back to him right here because he made me happy.

Currently, I write for two blogs and contribute guest posts here and there; that’s an average of 10 posts a week. A big portion of the time spent on these posts goes into identifying good links and of course all the little technical bits of actually putting the link in. So you can write one sentence in a few seconds but as soon as you add a link, it can turn into 20 minutes! Now multiply that by two to three links per post … (I’m just using myself as an example here; I know people who link even more than I do.)

Bloggers who link to us, then, are readers who have put quite a large amount of effort into that connection. They are people who have read our blogs, selected us out of hundreds of other bloggers, and gone to the trouble of placing a link to our post. They deserve a thank-you!

There are many ways to thank these people. One way that I really enjoy is how Urban Monk does it, who often adds a paragraph or two at the end of his post where he thanks people who have linked to him – here’s an example.

And talking about gratitude – I’d like to thank Ronald for inviting me to guest post here. I hope this contribution is the first of many.

4 days ago I was told by Sara about Google disabling external website addresses [urls] in all Blogger.com comments. 2 days ago Cerebral Mum also sent an e-mail saying that the act of disabling external websites in all Blogger.com comments was not an example of “user appreciation.” I read more into the topic, and realized that I agree.

The situation: Google disabling comments

What Google through Blogger.com is doing is not allowing readers to leave their external website addresses in the comments they are leaving. . That means you can only leave a comment if you are either a Google/Blogger.com user, or if you wish to be Anonymous with a nickname. As of this writing, Blogger.com is not allowing any field in the comments area to allow any commentor to enter their website url. A snapshot of the new Blogger.com comment page is included below.

What it means?

This means that if you want to leave a comment, you can either use your general name or nickname to identify yourself, or sign up for a Blogger.com account and log in through that account to leave a comment. This results in people having only a single fixed identity on Blogger.com, which is the blogger.com account itself. Otherwise, your only other option is to use a nickname to identify yourself. With millions of people having similar names, there will be no way to identify where “Michael” leaving a comment about pastries is the same Michael that left a comment last week supporting the idea of eating food while driving or if it was the other Michael who left a comment on how to hide from squirrels. One of the most unique identification elements online, a website, will not be allowed to be used in identifying you anymore. You are either a Blogger.com user, an Anonymous person, or no one.

All of this also means that the things you were told and expected to expect are now changing, and you were not consulted in any manner when such a change was being decided. Because of this, the following 14 effects result in you not being appreciated by Blogger.com .

The 14 bad effects

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