Dkos

I’ve been making daily Georgist diary entries cross-posted from this site for a little while now. I’ve been experimenting with different themes / times of day / titles. Yesterdays actually had the most comments of any topic I have posted to date (34 including my own) and I suspect it had lot to do with the title, Ethanol: Rent Seeking in Action. People didn’t care about after the colon; they just saw ethanol and went for it. The reason why I think that is I had no comments coming from a rent-seeking perspective, but there was a good discussion going on from a chemist, and other varied opinions.

I seem to get more recommends when I have lots of links and blocked quotes from other sources. I have no idea why that is, but if you look at the “recommended diary” list you will see a similar pattern.

Now, take my Net Neutrality post from a few days ago. I had two recommends and 0 comments. I suspect the reason is that the post is a little on the econ-speak side. I could be because my mechanics are not the best, but I reread it again this morning and it was definitely readable, and a few small errors here and there. Less then what I see in many recommended diaries. It could be I had a lot of readers, Dkos doesn’t give me this sort of data, but I doubt it because I track where my readers come from and generally speaking the more comments I get, the more hits I get from Dkos. Yesterday for example I had 6 hits coming directly from the ethanol thread alone.

The object here is to boost awareness which means trying to increase the likelihood any random person clicks on that diary and starts participating. I think there is a “tipping point” where some people only bother to read a non-recommended diary only if people have been commenting (I actually do that from time to time).

I’ve posted at most times of the day and it seems posting at or around 9AM – 10AM seems to work, but the data points from all other times are few. I think this has to do with most people read blogs at work. I’ve read about this before and noticed the same on my own blog. My readership goes down on the weekend.

I’ve never taken a class in journalism or marketing, so this is a fun learning experience for me and I thought I would share my experience with you. If you have any ideas for a title, just drop it in the comments and I’ll try and write a post around it. Same goes for times of day and Georgist themes.