Friday, July 13, 2012

Day-to-Day Stuff

Hey everyone, I've got a quick update and a question for you in regards to the general day-to-day stuff for the blog.

First up, commenting. There's a lot of talk on the tg blogs I frequent about commenting recently. I'm not going to go into a whole lot of depth as pretty much everything has been covered. If you're interested you can check out the conversations here, here, and here. What I want to focus on is idea of the disconnect between me as the author and you as the audience. I've always tried to keep the tone of this blog extremely informal and relaxed. Unfortunately I hurt that idea by how rarely I respond to comments, making it seem like I don't want to be a part of the conversation that goes on here. So starting now I'm going to try to respond to pretty much every comment I can as a way of showing you all how much I appreciate what you have to say about my work.

Which brings us to the second order of business, the question I have for all of you. Smitty suggested to me that I switch to click-through style of posting so that I can better track page views for individual captions. Now on a creator level that sounds great, but my primary goal is to make this blog work for the readers as much as possible. So I'm leaving it up to all of you. If you want to leave me a comment that's great, but since I want to get a feel for as much of my audience as possible, feel free to use the rating boxes at the bottom of the post as well.

If you like the idea of going to click-through, or if it doesn't really matter to you one way or the other, click "Great"

If you like the way the blog is now and don't want to add another click between you and the captions, click "Not My Thing"

I'll let this poll run for probably a week or so before making the decision to switch or not.

Oh, and if you don't know what I'm talking about, here are a couple of examples of the style I'd be switching to. This, this, and this.

14 comments:

  1. Click through is how my blog is, I set it up to mirror some of the other blogs I had seen, so I don't think it's a problem.

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    1. Thanks for the input. I'm not sure I would consider click-through a problem, I'm just trying to find the best way to get my content across, whether it be by more carefully tracking what is popular, or by making it as easy as possible to see my work.

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  2. You know, you bring up a very good topic Rauk. I never really focused on being part of the conversation with comments on my own blog. But now that you mention it, that might make people more standoffish. I have been trying to respond to more of them, but I might up my effort as well.

    As to the click through, I'll admit I'm a little biased as I already do that on my blog. I hate forcing people to make that extra click, but figured that little bit of effort helps me see what people are looking at. Even if they don't comment, it shows whats the most popular (and it rarely matches what's the most commented on). Since I've done that, I 'pay back' my viewers by making caps that match what people seem to like viewing even if it isn't the most creative or commented on caps.

    Oh... and just a word about clicking on the 'Not My Thing' or 'Great'... you do know that people can click on it as many times they want right? I had already clicked on the 'Great' before, and it let me do so again.

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    1. Thanks for bringing up some good points about click-through, I'm still on the fence but it seems like from a creator's perspective to be a much better way to judge feedback.

      And as for the issue of being able to vote multiple times I think I'm just going to go by an old Chicago motto from back when the mobs had a major influence on elections: "Vote Early and Vote Often." If someone cares enough to spam votes I'll take that as a good sign that at least there is one passionate viewer out there who really wants to get their point across.

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  3. I know you already know my opinion on this, but let me just say this. This vote perfectly encapsulates why I switched to views instead of votes. Views reflect much better how people feel because there is a much larger pool to view. Why let fourteen people decide what works and doesn't? You have thousands of people viewing every cap that may never leave any other input. I have had people express some frustration at having to click through, but even they admitted it was worth the hassle.

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    1. Here is my my main question about click-through. What really determines why someone clicks on a post? There are the regular readers who are going to click everything, and then there are those who are coming back to read it a second time, both of which are useful for determining how popular a caption is. But what about the others? The title? The tags? The sample image if you use one?

      While the voting system is obviously flawed, in principle it means that someone has read the caption before deciding its merit, instead of having people who just scan the cap count the same as someone who actually read it just because they both clicked through.

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    2. I personally use the pageviews and the commonality between highly viewed caps to determine that information. The differences between caps can be quite staggering. For example my more XXX caps can quickly climb up to 3K pageviews in a matter of a couple days, while my cleaner but more creative caps struggle to reach 1K pageviews in the same time period.

      So I generally associate high pageviews with more explicit content (title, images used, and story content all affect the number of views).

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    3. Well there will be an initial surge of views just based on curiosity. But you will see some caps continue to climb even after you post new ones. This means repeat views and tends to mean more successful caps. There is a big difference between 3000 views and over 10,000 views. It can tell you a lot about how a cap was received.

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    4. Interesting. Thanks for the input. I'm still going to hold off for a few more days in case anyone else wants to throw their two cents in, but right now I'm thinking that at the very least I'll be doing a trial run of the click-through system just to see how it goes.

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  4. I was the first one to Jenifer's comment topic so I thought I'd respond here. You are far and away one of my favorite cappers and I have not given you nearly enough input. much of what I said there applies here as well. I however. have been inspired to comment more. it only takes a minute after all!

    TFBunny via TFMedia.org

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  5. I like it just fine the way it is, but its your baby and if you think you'll get more saticefaction out of the clicky way, well, you've got to keep the chef happy.

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  6. If you decide to switch to one of the examples you gave I vote for Caitlyn's masks format. There you can see a smaller version of the cap and the main page is more atractive than a long list of title/links.

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    1. That's the style I'm going to use for a trial run.

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