Seven Days of the Dog: The regal, indomitable arrogance of a healthy, normal Bloodhound

This came in as a comment last night.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be competitive and wanting to win, but, reading your posts the last few weeks, you ego is a little bit too big at times. Yes, you are a heck of a writer and you have one heck of a blog and you have assembled a heck of a team of contributors, but your ego is getting a bit cocky.

This is ad hominem, so it violates our comments policy, but I’m not averse to discussing the issue it raises in a general way.

Just not yet.

First, let’s address some general beefs I have with the world of real estate weblogging. You can regard this as an impromptu staff meeting of the RE.net, or, if you’d rather, as a Pompeii-like graffito.

Here’s one: I’m seeing more and more truncated feeds, and I am unthrilled about it. My entire purpose in using a feed reader is to aggregate everything I might want to see in one place. If I’m interested in what you have to say, I might click through to your site, but I don’t appreciate being forced to do so. I understand that you may be trying to boost your hard clicks, possibly to placate your advertisers, or you might be trying to frustrate sploggers. I don’t care. If you don’t capture my attention completely in the forty or fifty words you deign to show me, there is zero chance that I will click through to see if I might be missing something good. I can’t be that different from your target reader. You got ’em to subscribe. Now deliver the goods. Hoarding — for whatever reason — is the economics of the past.

(Near the subject, I had mentioned a long time ago (in a comment or somewhere) that I almost never do trackbacks. If for no other reason than that it offers automatic trackbacks and pingbacks, WordPress should be your CMS of choice for any weblogs you build (or migrate to) in the future.)

Here’s another beef: This came in as a comment to Real Estate Weblogging 101:

I think you should make your URL’s prettier:

Optimize your permalinks – the default WP 2.0 installation displays permalinks this way: DOMAIN.com/?p-123. A more search-engine friendly permalink includes the post title in the link, like this: DOMAIN.com/2006/01/16/keyword-rich-post-title/. This is a simple change to make. In your WP admin panel, click on the “Options” tab, then the “Permalinks” sub-tab, and choose the option just below the “Default” permalink option. See the WordPress Codex for more on permailinks.

If you need help with that I can gladly show you the ropes.

I’m sure this is well-intentioned, and the offer to help is awfully sweet. There is really only one thing wrong with it.

What’s that?

It’s wrong.

In terms of Search Engine Optimization, the default format of a WordPress permalink is probably as good as or better than any alternative. James Brausch argues that other permalink structures actually damage search engine performance. Google certainly prefers short URLs to longer ones. And even if Google honors keywords in the URL and not just in the domain name, having the date encoded in the URL serves no SEO purpose at all.

On the other hand, coding permalinks in a way that is consistent and repeatable for human beings is of huge benefit — to those human beings. For the most part, readers are not going to type weblog links no matter how they are coded. But bloggers themselves are going to have to encode their own links again and again. The format suggested by my correspondent is far more error-prone than the WordPress default.

We go this one better by building our tools around our permalink structure. I have a keyboard macro that builds a fully-formed BloodhoundBlog link, absent only the number of the post and the anchoring text. The macro leaves the cursor flashing at the point where the number is to be typed. I can copy the text I want to anchor and remember the post number, then produce a fault-free link back into the weblog in a couple of seconds.

All that is as may be, and there is a point at which SEO debates are as interesting to me as PBS documentaries. What is interesting to me is the epistemological method that goes into making decisions. It really doesn’t make any difference how you code your permalinks, because, beneficial or damaging, any benefit or damage is going to be trivial compared to other things you can do to improve your SEO performance, notably boosting your Page Rank or writing strong posts with strong headlines (and putting your headline in your title tag).

On the other hand, coding your permalinks in a way that saves time and makes errors less likely appeals to my way of thinking. So why do so many weblogs use the format my correspondent suggested? My guess is that, rather than thinking about what might make sense in context, people mostly copied what other people were doing. Recall that the WordPress default is domain.com/?p=123. Why do people change it? Why do they insist, again and again, that duplicating a permalink format that contains eleven characters of completely dysfunctional date information before we even get to the possibly-completely-useless-or-even-harmful keywords — why do they echo, again and again, what could well be pernicious misinformation?

When the Project Blogger competition got started, I wrote this in email to Teri Lussier:

Seriously, everything is what it is because some idiot had to do something, had no clue what to do, bespied another idiot who seemed to be doing something right, copied that idiot and called himself an expert. No one has the first idea what they are doing, and they’re all as busy as hell doing the wrong things.

I get frustrated, but I can’t change very much very quickly. Here’s the cool part, though: The world is a wide open bank vault for people who trust themselves enough to think in their own behalf.

That seems kind of harsh, but stop for a moment and think of all the locally-focused real estate weblogs you have seen that feature photos of the hometown skyline. Do you get the idea that people are reading real estate weblogs because they want to buy skyscrapers? If you wander the Earth like Diogenes, questing and quarrying for the reasons motivating the things that people do, the answer you will come up with most often is: Monkey-see, monkey-do.

And that brings me to Project Blogger in earnest. I took time to read the contestants’ weblogs for the first time this week. This was a soporific experience. With a very few exceptions, the blogs read like those slap-happy brochures you find at the check-in counter of dismal little back-country motels. They sit there in their little take-one racks, defying you to read them, taunting you with their illimitable power to stupefy.

I am nobody’s micro-manager. There are no rules of any kind for the contributors to BloodhoundBlog, and I directed Teri’s efforts in the Project Blogger competition in only the biggest of big-picture ways. But I am very much interested in the philosophy of weblogging — weblogging as such, not just real estate weblogging — which is why we undertook our efforts in this contest in public, first here and then at RealEstateWeblogging101.com.

It seems plausible to me that this was time well wasted, at least as regards the other contestants.

Teri gets it, but I picked her as my apprentice because she gets it. My take on most of the other Project Blogger contestants is that they have no idea why anyone would write — or read — a weblog.

Here’s the deal, and may god help you if this comes to you as news: People do not read those brochures on the motel registration desk. They take them, thinking they will read them, thinking they might want to make time for some of the local attractions no matter how pedestrian those might be. But then they dump them in the teeny-tiny little motel trash can, or, feeling guilty for not making what in fact would be a poor use of their time, schlep them in their bags, throwing them away when they get back home.

Must I be more pellucid?: Writing inoffensive tapioca pabulum that is boring even to you as the writer will not win you an audience. You may get long tail search results from Google, but your bounce rate will be off the charts: People may find you by searching on your keywords, but they will correctly identify your stupefying prose as advertising, and they will flee at once.

You may now and then get a lead from your weblog — even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while. What you will not do is build a community of people who are committed to you and you only for all things real estate. Brian Brady has been talking about viral marketing, but the essence of viral marketing is the “sneezer” — the person who wouldn’t ever think of not using you. Who, even better, won’t let friends or family members use anyone else. Who, best of all, actively recruits new clients for you. A true weblog is one of the best ways you have of meeting new sneezers. And a false one — false, as Emerson has it, in all particulars — is your best weapon for driving them away.

So who is at fault, the apprentices or the coaches? Have the nascent bloggers been badly advised by their coaches, or are all of them just self-selected victims of the monkey-see, monkey-do mindset? It doesn’t much matter, just as it doesn’t matter who wins this competition. Two or three of the contestants will come away with real weblogs, and the rest will have produced motel brochures without knowing where — or even that — they went wrong.

All of which brings us back to the topic with which we began. A Bloodhound’s virtues are genetic accidents, but that doesn’t make them less than perfectly admirable, whether evidenced in the dog or anthropomorphized and expressed in thoroughly conscious human behavior. Brought up right, a Bloodhound is a natural alpha, regal and indomitable. The dog will move with a lanky, un-self-conscious arrogance that is simply heart-breakingly beautiful to look upon: This what a thriving organism looks like.

I am steadfastly, philosophically opposed to the idea of humility. I think it is one of many evil ideas foisted off on us by malefactors who love us best at our absolute worst. To say to me, “You’re arrogant,” or, “you have a big ego,” is no reproach. On the one hand, it is a statement of obvious fact. But on the other, it puts me on my guard against you. A healthy, normal human being moves and acts and thinks and speaks with the lanky arrogance of a healthy, normal Bloodhound. When people don’t behave that way, I want to know why. When they affect to preach against healthy, normal human behavior, I go on defense — and not by half-measures.

The comment quoted above is nothing, just so much word salad. People repeat what they’ve been told their whole lives — monkey-see, monkey-do — for no reason they can name. They have habituated emotional reactions to behaviors they have been told since childhood are wrong without ever puzzling out what is right, what is wrong, and what their habituated emotional reactions have to do with either. None of this means anything to me. Either you can defend your position in cogent reason, or I am occupied elsewhere. I know why my lanky arrogance is better for me, in the context of my own one irreplaceable life, and there is nothing anyone can say to persuade me to hate my life in other people’s behalf.

Even so, this makes for a good lesson in weblogging. Art is social, and a secondary objective of any work of art — even a work of art as banal as a weblog post — is to elicit a response. Not simply a comment, mind you, not the enblogged equivalent of a high-five, but an authentic, heart-felt response: “Thank you so much for saying that!” “Oh, what crap!!” “I thought I was the only person who felt this way!” “Your unwillingness to kneel to the vicious trolls I affect to worship as gods leads me to unpleasant doubts about their divinity, which I am obliged to blame on you.” Oh, wait, that last was a translation of email I get all the time…

In fact, other people’s responses to your work should never be a primary consideration to you. The writing is either good or it isn’t. But if you are not eliciting emotion-laden responses from your readers, what you are doing is brochure-production, not weblogging.

But, in any case, if you feel a strong urge to tell me that I am as arrogant as a normal, healthy Bloodhound, regal and indomitable — what can I say in reply except, “Thanks!”

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