Charles Atkins of Dyvers fame posted over on G+ about other people's posts. Do you chime in, or wait a while so you don't seem like you're piggy-backing?
Me, I'm 100% pro-post here.
An idea shared is an idea multiplied.
If I write something that triggers your own thoughts, throw them in the comments.
Even better, blog about it on your own blog and comment.
Either way, if you write a related post, don't be shy about telling me and everyone else. Put a link in the comments (and HTMLize it if you can.) If you take an idea I have and run with it, people who like most post benefit more if they can easily find your post.
By all means expand on the idea. Explain how you'd do it, if it's different. Take the idea and go new and interesting places with it. Link back. The third w in WWW is the "web" part, so connect up. As long as it's not spam, I'm not going to clip the comment.
Posts like the early GURPS 101 posts, Melee Academy, and even concepts like GURPSday (started by Doug) all celebrate multiple writers spinning around the same ideas. Lots of times the circle of GURPS-centered blogs have deliberately coordinated and even more often just randomly sprang off of each other's posts.
So if you have more to say and you can take Post X and make it Post X+1, do it.
Count on it!
ReplyDeleteI highly appreciate the traffic I receive by being listed in your blog roll.
ReplyDeleteIf it's something interesting that you post that triggers my thoughts, you'll get an immediate comment here. If it's something that needs to simmer for a while or required more than a dozen sentences to elucidate, then I'll make a post out of it on my own blog, but always with a link back here.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest thing for me is waiting until I have something substantive to say. I mean, I *could* post "That's awesome!" after all of your DF session reports, but it would get repetitive and stalkery after a while.
I do it all the time, and proudly. If I can riff off of something that someone else posted, and add my own spin on it, I'll absolutely do it (and give credit to the original post). Remember just a few years ago, when that was normal? We'd have discussions across a dozen different blogs, over the course of a week or so, with posts, and tangents, and replies, and replies to the replies. It made for a very rich and in-depth discussions. I miss that.
ReplyDeleteJoe, I get the sense a lot of that has moved over to G+ circles. I'm not plugged in enough to know much about the real-time social media stuff, but the few wide ranging threads I've seen have all be pointers from blogs to G+. The immediacy of the G+ community seems to this outsider to blow through conversations in a few hours what used to simmer for days through the blogosphere. That make any sense to you?
DeleteThat's exactly what it feels like. Plus, with privacy and ad-blocking extensions installed, commenting on blogs turned out to be far more complicated than commenting on G+. And often blogs and their comment forms are nigh unusable on my old iPhone 4. But the G+ app is not.
DeleteI suspect you guys are right - but a lot of the G+ stuff feels ephemeral and time-sensitive to me. I miss threads entirely unless someone mentions me by name. Even then, I have trouble finding them again later. It's like it comes and goes. Blog posts, though, I can keep revisiting (or discussion much later) and get something out of them.
DeleteI tend to do both, in a bit of a hierarchy. My most involved is to take something someone said - say Peter talking about mapless combat - and write an entire post on it.
DeleteThe next level down is for me to make a small additive comment on Peter's blog. Not worthy of a post by itself. The exception is if someone writes something that I just want to say "Dudes. Everyone must read this," in which case I'll take my comment or recommendation, and wrap it around a link to the original post.
Finally, my G+ stuff is usually fact-based answers to questions, or a quick one-off based on a comment to the original share link.
But I think Warren's correct about what happened - I've got 600+ followers in my Roleplaying Games circles, but only about 60 on my blog . . . which is of course where all the content comes from!