Why Don’t More Entertainment Professionals Blog?
I’ve been wondering about the nature of blogging lately, in a personal context. I’m not altogether sure how to skirt the edge between personal outlet, promotional tool and news resource. I think this might be why more entertainment professionals don’t blog for their own enjoyment. Make no mistake, I do this as a form of recreation first and foremost.
When you first start reading up on how to get a blog pumping you’ll read about how you need to find other similar sites to blogroll with. This worked very well when I founded Illusion On Demand and made a friendly community of science fiction blogs to join. At the height of Illusion’s Better Living Through Science Fiction blog we had seven bloggers writing daily. At the time I left Illusion we were down to three. We found that the seven were a little bit of overkill. Having gotten in the habit of blogging on a regular basis I decided to keep it up here on this site. This decision lead to a puzzling problem, how could I find other sites to blogroll with when I have no common theme. Is there any real way to promote something so haphazardly tossed together? Ive discovered that the answer is yes. It’s all about mixing my every day crap with things that people actually want to read. This formula has been working out. It also doesn’t hurt that I’ve been getting more of a public profile having snagged a few studio writing gigs and appearances on the genre convention circuit.
How well does this work? Well, I sometimes read the blog of actress Kat Dennings. She’s one of the stars of the soon to be released Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. She’s an attractive hip chick that’s been in a few major studio pictures. That would normally tell me that she should be pounding me into the ground with fans. Well, according to one of my new favorite sites websiteoutlook.com, I actually beat her in traffic.
This tells me that relative fame doesn’t equate to web traffic. A lot of entertainment folks blog over at Huffington Post and do small blogs for individual projects, but finding a genuine entertainment industry professional who blogs is rare. Warren Ellis is a master of the blogging format and I’m not ashamed to say that in many instances I’ve stolen from the best. Kevin Smith also does very well with the format. Maybe it’s that so much of our industry is segmented by jobs and unions that actors and directors feel uncomfortable with the format. Maybe some people consider it work and refuse to do it without pay? I don’t have an answer for this strange blogging divide, but if you’re curious to see who IS blogging you can visit Blogger’s Blog and cruise their celebrity category.