Today’s post is inspired by Seth Godin’s March 31, 2008 post Where Do We Begin?

I’ll summarize his point less elegantly than he wrote it:  your knowledge about an author has an impact on how you interpret his or her words.  At the same time, a writer often makes assumptions about how much background knowledge the reader has about the writer.  Seth makes the following statements:

I think this dichotomy of experience raises the level of responsibility for the reader. Without knowing who you’re reading, it’s hard to judge the tone of voice of what you’re hearing. More important, it changes the posture of the writer.

I think Seth’s argument is somewhat flawed and may potentially alienate new readers. 

In the case of a blogger, there’s usually a lot of context lying behind what’s being written in each post.  This underlying context is sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden - often unintentionally.

In the past, a newspaper or magazine columnist could often write their column while making the assumption that their reader would remember previous columns.  I sometimes make that assumption in my own little column in my local newspaper.  I do this unconsciously because I know the newspaper has a loyal readership and chances are good that if someone is reading my column today, they’ve likely read a previous column.

It’s a lot different on the Web.  There are five main sources of traffic that can hit a website:

  1. Subscriber or otherwise loyal reader - call them the “converted”
  2. The recommendation - you check out something because someone else suggested that you should
  3. Social news - someone submitted your post to Digg, Reddit, Propeller, or some other website and, miracle of miracles, it became popular, meaning that you’ll get a relatively huge spike of visitors who are seeing your writing for the first time
  4. Social bookmarking - similar in concept to social news traffic, social bookmarking traffic, from sites like Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, or even StumbleUpon, seems to be more about value and less about “hotness” - the old substance vs. style argument.
  5. Search engines - this is where things really get interesting.  I’ve read that search engine traffic becomes an increasingly larger contributor to the traffic hitting your blog as your content both increases and improves.  In other words, people find your blog by searching for keywords or topics.  This means that more and more strangers will be dropping by your blog because it seems to meet some of the criteria that they’re searching for.

Items 3, 4, and 5 were somewhat possible, through different media and different vehicles, prior to Web 2.0, but they happen much more frequently now because of the searchable, read/write web.  They also seem to become a increasingly greater source of traffic as a blog matures.

One could argue, then, that as your blog becomes more popular you’re going to get more strangers stopping by.  Considering that most of us probably only know a few hundred people, it makes sense that you’re going to have a lot of strangers, or first-timers, visit your blog as it becomes more popular.

Having said all of this, while Seth has a good point in that the reader is well advised to acquire some background knowledge and understanding about the author of the work that they’re reading, the counter-argument is that writers should be making it as easy as possible for new visitors to get up to speed, especially when an increasingly large number of visitors are new to the blog or document in question.

FAQs, quick start guides, and even good old instruction manuals are there for a reason.  They are there to orient the new user and to provide valuable information when needed.

Therefore, the trend I see in articles which talk about having a good About Me page makes sense to me. 

Skellie has written about the value of an About page.  It provides context to help understand the author’s beliefs, background, and their personality.   The About page also makes it easy for the reader to get that information, without having to wade through dozens, hundreds, or possibly thousands of posts.

Other bloggers are making pages with their most popular posts and other important information.   Jonathan Fields has a very good new visitor’s guide.

For my part, I’ve been gradually adding to and improving my static pages over time.  I’d like to think that it’s not that difficult for a new reader to jump in to my blog and orient themselves fairly quickly, but I’m sure I can do a better job of that.  Another project to add to the list.

And so I must disagree with Seth Godin on this point.  It certainly helps a reader to have adequate background knowledge about the author before they start reading, but I’d argue that an author, blogger or otherwise, is better advised to:

  • provide content that requires as little background context as possible to understand
  • provide reference information to help orient the user

Especially if the author isn’t a well known and respected expert AND they are trying to build an audience.

Many of the best products simple and relatively easy to use - should that include writing?

What do you think?  Why not share your thoughts in the comments section below?

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