Good vs Bad Internet Writing

In the age where everyone and anyone can write a blog, share a few thoughts on youtube, or have a few followers on twitter, it's important to get your message out there and heard. With so many other bloggers out there, how can a writer get their thoughts out there to the widest audience possible?

In these times, when people want to find information on something they will first resort to doing a simple google search on the topic. After the standard wikipedia page, most people won't bother to look on the second or third page of google to find whatever they are looking for. To be effective, you first have to get listed on google and then make sure your page ranks high enough to get noticed. Brian Clark's "How to Create Compelling Content" points out that to get onto these search engines you must use key words that help to summarize and explain your topic but you can't just stuff these words into a single article and hope for the best.  The whole site must cater to the "spiders" that crawl through the web looking for links and just one post full of keywords won't help the site's rankings. Clark also mentions that not only is it important to have content, but to have people consistently talk about it and link back to it. This is where Deanna Zandt's "How you will change the world with social networking" comes into play. Zandt provides examples of how using twitter, facebook and even tumblr can help to get an idea out there and engage readers. Zandt points out that engaging readers across a series of platforms will help to spread the word of your website and bring in even more readers that will hopefully stay around for future posts.

However all of these factors doesn't necessarily mean that your content will be well written and will persuade readers to read further. One example of this is Media Take Out. Even though it is wildly popular , the design is simplistic and the comments are often plagued by bots trying to advertise another product. They also don't provide any in depth information as to what they're reporting on so it would be difficult to find their version of a popular story on a search engine.This same problem plagues another blog called The Daily What. Even though it focuses more as a link aggregate and not as a vendor of original content, it would be hard to find it on a search engine and the focus of the blog frequently shifts. Even though it is on tumblr where content can easily be shared with a reblog, it doesn't encourage any dialogue.

One blog that does the opposite of this is Tofugu  It is clear that they are focusing on reporting on all aspects of Japanese culture and that they also help with learning Japanese. Some of their biggest hits on the site come from a post of other Japanese learning resource links and from there readers can explore the site and find other articles about culture and language learning.  Even though Oh No They Didn't is a gossip blog like Mediatakeout, it uses live journal's platform to give a sense of community and organization to its posts. The posts can be easily shared through facebook and twitter and it is easy to access old content through the use of tags.