Commentary

Bland Ambition (Or How NOT To Optimize Content Creation)

Sound like an oxymoron? I have to agree with Michael Arrington, but I’m also one of those “hand-crafted content� people, so I may not be an objective judge.

But Arrington’s main concern is that a new generation of content creators – ie. bloggers – have become so consumed with the metrics of how their content performs, that they’ve lost sight of the hand crafting part of writing that makes content so rich to begin with.

Arrington was responding to Marshall Kirkpatrick’s earlier disclosure about what happened when he added the word “oops� to a headline and sent traffic soaring to his ReadWriteWeb blog.

“There are guys out there who look at the metrics, and that’s all they look like,� Arrington asserted, adding that if it continues, the blogosphere will end up looking like “the content you see in magazines on airplanes: bland crap.�

By the way, use of the term “bland crap� in a blog entry has been proven to send traffic soaring.

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