Never mind the quality, it’s the quantity that counts

One of the requirements for a successful blog is lots of hits daily. So a great blog, well written, informative, useful, that is not pushed, via Facebook, twitter, cajoling friends (and even enemies) is not a success. On the other hand, a blog that is really a disgrace to language and intelligence, seemingly aimed at the intelligence level of any slightly demented amoeba, that is pushed hard and has many hits, is a success.

Why do I care? I actually don’t, well not much anyway. I write this blog for my own satisfaction. If it is read by anyone more intelligent than the average Arsenal supporter, I am pleased. But I will continue to post, because it fills a need in me, whether it is read or not. And the number of hits that I get daily, does that interest me? Yes and no. I am more interested in what was hit rather than how many were hit.

I had a significant number or hits yesterday, many coming via searches. The largest number of hits came from searches for information about text alignment and justification, which turned up my Is style justified? post in the list of results, accounting for the hits. I have no complaints about this. I have a view on how useful justification is, just like I have a view about that hallowed technical writing bible the Chicago Manual of Style. Just because I don’t agree with what it professes to be laws written in stone doesn’t mean I can’t comment on it. And if people search for information about justification and alight upon my words of wisdom, so much the better.

One hit, however, was from someone who had searched for information about GPS. Now, my blog post about GPS, Finding your way – Is using GPS a good thing?, talked about the negative impact overuse of GPS has on the hippocampus as a way of introducing navigation as an important part of the technical writing process. You know the sort of thing I mean, a well designed table of contents, useful index, etc. The relevance to GPS was minor. I did, however include GPS in my tag list, so anyone searching for GPS might alight on my post. I did this for a number of reasons. Firstly, the opening part of the post I thought was interesting and was directly linked to overuse of GPS. So, anyone assessing my post did gain some information about GPS that they might not otherwise have known or found out about. Secondly, I knew it would increase the number of hits to my sight. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realise that GPS as a search item is going to be more popular than, I don’t know, what about hippocampus, for example.

Is it right to prostitute oneself for the sake of hits? And applying this to the world of technical writing, is it right to dumb-dowm the material to make it more accessible? To make it appeal to a wider audience?

Obviously, most of the time the audience you are aiming to reach is bounded. So reaching the masses is not relevant. But what about making the material more accessible? Just like including a tag to get a hit, which might help the reader, but just as easily might be irrelevant to him, including interactive material for example, such as quizzes or videos instead of tedious text to make the material more accessible, to get that extra hit, is most definitely a good thing. If you get more people using the product you are documenting by creating material that is not quite documentation but gets what you need to get across, across, then go for it. We enter the grey area between documentation and training, but anyway these are two sides of the same coin, so does it really matter which side falls up when you flip the coin? So dumb-down the documentation? Never! be creative in how you present the material? Definitely! Even if it means including the odd tag that is not too relevant to the subject matter.

And will I tag GPS for this post? probably not – I’m not as big a tag whore as the next blogger!