What makes a good gardening blog?
Lynsey on Marginalia recently posted about his quest to find a good gardening blog. He explained how bloggers increase search engine rankings of an otherwise uninteresting blog by creating irrelevant external links. Some bloggers use ‘splogs’ which are blogs set up purely for generating spam links to their own blogs. These frivolous links pollute services like Google or Technorati, and make it harder to find quality blogs.
We don’t know any garden bloggers that pollute search engines, do we?
So what was Lynsey’s conclusion?
“All I’m trying to find is a couple of gardening blogs, well written, frequently updated, nicely photographed etc. I tried to get some sense out of Google, tried some blogrolls – but in the end, while I’m more than prepared to fight for your right to have another kitten blog, it’s not what I want right now, and I just haven’t found one that delivers the goods yet. I think ultimately I’ll just write my own…”
What are we missing? What is that special ingredient which makes a good garden blog? What can we do to draw attention to good blogs, and away from mediocre ones? Is garden blogging dead? Is it just that Lynsey is in the middle of a New Zealand summer while those of us in the northern hemisphere have just passed the winter solstice, so there is nothing to blog about?
Are we just always going to suck, or is there some hope for us?
I don’t know where she is looking but by following links from other blogs I have discovered dozens of blogs which keep me interested. I must admit my main interest is allotments, so I ignore most of the just gardening ones….if I didn’t I would never dop anything else but read blogs! I joined blogroll so that I only get notified when the blogs are updated and find I now have a satisfactory experience reading them when I have the time.
Hi Patrick
Whoa – an entire article dedicated to me moaning about search engines. 🙂 What more can a guy ask for? Happy new year to you and yours, by the way. Working my way up your posting – which seems like a good approach from a southern hemisphere perspective – our summer so far has been a couple of afternoons ago – at least we’re not experiencing the drought and fires of south east Australia, although some averaging of our weather would be gratefully accepted by us both.
The issue at hand isn’t whether there are good gardening blogs – I’m sure there are – it’s just very difficult – time consuming, more accurately, to find them. The tools we have available are factory machines, presently incapable of refined i.e. human values. Sifting the wheat from the chaff is what my Dad would say. It’s just like the article you’ve written about the Dutch farmer and the more creative cheeses etc – I wish I lived there – not only would I buy his products with great joy, I’d be wanting to spend some time as a volunteer learning how to make or encourage the production of the product. All of which would lead to greater involvement and understanding of the farmer, the animals, and the processes.
I believe that in that article you’ve captured the difference that makes the difference in writing blogs, and finding them. I can’t find any writing of a similar nature commenting on the efficient beauty of the factory farm machine. Most people pay quite a lot of attention to the look and feel of their blogs. It’s anything but a mechanised process, even though most of it is automated. The issue, for me, is the search engines can’t speed the process of finding good content – that requires, as with your farmer, the human touch, and perhaps more importantly, the application of human(e) values.
For me, the process has started (ahem, you might’ve noticed the links starting in the Marginalia side bar, one to a blog er, nearby). I expect to write about my own garden in a month or two – I’m preparing the soil even as I write here.
Thanks for stopping by, Lynsey
Great response to this question Pat & Steph. I find that Garden Voices has been the best update of all gardening blogs and I know that Caren (OldRoses) does a great job of organising the RSS feeds so that we can all enjoy some great gardening blogs and discover new ones.
lilymarlene + Stuart:
I agree with you both. Too many good garden blogs and not enough time. Maybe the power in garden blogs is in the ability to pick and choose amongst them all. I’m also a big fan of Garden Voices.
Lynsey:
I accept your post was mostly about the problems of search engines and not garden blogs, and I’m sorry I didn’t make that clear. Mostly I wonder if there is any way all of us can learn something from your comments. Since we are all directly involved with garden blogging, I think it’s sometimes hard for us to see things from the perspective of an outsider. In rereading my post I can see it came out seeming much more critical of you than I intended. It was more my intention to start a discussion by being a bit controversial.
I think in general as a community we are very closed and inaccessible, and I think that shows in the problems you were having with search engines. I also don’t understand why we are not more connected with other blogging communities, for example food blogs. Maybe it’s because other blogging communities are just as closed as we are.
Best wishes for the new year, and welcome to the world of garden blogging. Good luck with your garden. Thanks for your comments. I’m looking forward to seeing your new blog as it develops. I’m also looking forward to any ideas you come up with to address the problems you identified in your post.
To Everyone:
As we go into the new year, I will be trying to come up with ideas to improve my blog and address some of these issues. I would welcome any comments or suggestions anyone has to offer.
A good gardening blog answer question and provides information about gardening.Everything about garden,plants,flowers,crops as a whole.I mostly look for gardening blogs that will help to solve my problem in growing certain plants.