My Cameo Appearance on Louis Gray’s Blog
July 22, 2008 4 Comments
I had a chance to do a cameo blog post over on Louis Gray’s blog. You can see it right now, Bloggers’ Interactions With Readers Decrease With Prominence.The gist of the post is this:
One observation to make is this: the level of interaction seems to vary by the blogger’s level of established reputation. As a blogger gets more well-known on the Web, the level of interaction declines.
This was my first-ever guest blog post. I’ve seen others do it. Pretty neat, ain’t it? Here are some things that occurred to me as a I wrote it.
Louis’s blog is a lot bigger than mine. Per Technorati, Louis is a Top 5,000 blogger. A much bigger audience than mine. He’s a regular on Techmeme. I always want to put my best content here, but I have some coverage if a post doesn’t get much traction. People who read this blog know me, and have a sense of what I’ll write n the future. Over on Louis’s blog, there’s a much bigger audience. They’ve come to expect a certain quality. Louis’s expectations became my expectations.
The chart below is the one I used in the guest post on Louis’s blog:
Louis is a Stage 3 blogger. With that, some of the crazy experimentation I like to do (such as my stick man representation of social media interactions) is not appropriate on his blog. I was cognizant of that.
I picked a subject that is consistent with Louis’s overall blog. The role of bloggers, and their interactions is the kind of subject that Louis regularly covers. I wanted a post that fit his “brand”. So I didn’t write one of my Enterprise 2.0 pieces, because that’s not something he covers.
I took forever to write it. Weirdly, it just took me longer to finish up this post than it usually does. Probably for the two reasons listed above.
A lot of fun, and I thank Louis for letting me rent his blog for a day. Go check out my post on his blog:
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2008/07/bloggers-interactions-with-readers.html
UPDATE: My guest blog post made it onto Techmeme: http://www.techmeme.com/080722/p142#a080722p142
About Hutch Carpenter
I'm Not Actually a Geek 
Can we expect a number crunch of the results from doing a guest blog post?
Hey Colby – sure. I can do something on that.
I can understand why a guest blog post would take forever to write. I’ve only guest blogged once, and that was on a very small blog called “Word Search” which was engaged in an online Bible study. Even then, I found that I had to take more care with my content, bearing in mind that I was the “guest” and that stuff I’d usually do on my own blog might not necessarily be good on the other person’s blog. In addition, I had to make sure that my post was consistent with the overall purpose of the blog.
OE – you described exactly how I felt. It’s not that easy to guest post, at least not your first time.