Three is a magic number. While Schoolhouse Rock is not an informative source on how to make a good blog, three is definitely the number of important qualities I believe every blog desires. First, a blog needs to be communal. A content creator cannot simply talk at her audience, she needs to reach out and bring them into the conversation in a variety of ways. Second, a blog needs to be multimodal. Variety can spice up a site’s content, and a site that appeals with more than one kind of content can attract a wider audience. Third, a blog needs to be viral. Like a living virus or an ear-worm song like Chocolate Rain by Tay Zonday, a site’s content needs to be tempting and effortless to share. All of these qualities make me think of a video by Youtuber Ricepirate called Blogger-Down. The minute and forty second flash animation features an old man who wants to profit from blogging and a younger man who explains that a blog requires good images, a commenting system, and a social networking interface. All of these requirements fit inside what I call “The Trinity” of blogging.
Communal:
Communal writing in online community does not get nearly the amount of credit it should for improving the growth of a digital writer. One of my favorite definitions of writing growth comes Pete Rorabaugh, author of the article Organic Writing and Digital Media: Seeds and Organs, who writes, “Growth is determined by the encouragement and critique of the community.” It used to be that a young writer’s community of peers was an editor or a writing workshop. On the internet, a young writer’s community of peers is a comment section, which is a much larger pool of critics. In fact, you, reader, will be my proof for this point as I assign you the task of giving me some feedback for this post in the comment section.
Multimodal:
To highlight multimodal qualities, take The Onion, a parody website dedicated to fake news for entertainment purposes. One look at their website reveals a grid of headlines with corresponding pictures and a mixture of stories done in both text, video, and comic strip. I imagine the average visitor to the Onion has needs that change with the situation. Sometimes, they want to read a text article in a public where a video with sound would be distracting. Other times, they want to laugh their asses off to a playlist of featured videos in privacy. In either case, every story always has links to more stories in different media formats. The Onion has a little something for everyone in enough formats to please anyone.
Viral:
Viral content simply needs a method to be re-posted elsewhere and a tempting reason to be elsewhere. Websites like Buzzfeed.com execute both with thought-interesting article titles as well as links that share the article’s link on social media. Combined with a multimodal selection of content, it is no surprise that Buzzfeed is the #10 most visited site in the US.
To bring home the concept of the blogging trinity, I found the article Digital Writing Uprising: Third-order Thinking in the Digital Humanities by Sean Michael Morris to be incredibly useful. I believe Morris summarizes what it means to write with communal and viral aspects:
“Digital words have lives of their own. We may write them, birth them ourselves, but without any compunction or notice, they enact themselves in ways we can’t predict. And this is because digital writing is communal writing.”
Morris does not directly mention multimodal aspects such as videos or pictures, but it is not hard to image how viral videos like Tay Zonday’s Chocolate Rain have a life of their own as well. A blog that follows this trinity is one that has a two-way conversation with it’s community, posts a variety of types of content, and makes an impression that is passed around like a good gossip story . It is my hope that this blog will try to attain at least two of the three qualities in the trinity.
Ricepirate – Graphic Demise: Blogger Down
All video credit goes to Youtuber Ricepirate