Thursday 1 September 2016

Foster kids - On feeling ignored

Three things matter quite a lot to most bloggers - the number of readers, the number of other blogs that include a link to your blog and the number of comments your individual blog entries receive. Nothing demotivates a blogger more than not getting any readers but bloggers who don't swap links and readers who don't bother to comment on what they have just read are creating secondary problems.

When I joined the wonderful "Weekly Adoption Shout Out" my number of visitors shot up and the site gave me access to a wide range of useful blogs. So was everything in the world of Eve and Ella wonderful? Not quite!



For the first few weeks I regularly commented on 3 or 4 of the blogs - I also put in a link from my blog to the other blog. Virtually nobody returned the compliment which made me feel quite sad.

Not getting any feedback on a blog post can be very demoralising. Like many bloggers Ella and I put our heart and soul into what we write and we spend a lot of time thinking about what we are going to publish so the deafening sound of reader indifference can be quite hard to live with. I am not suggesting that every reader should feel obliged to comment on every individual post in every blog they read. But when a blogger is attracting 200 to 300 readers per blog entry without motivating a single person to comment then surely there is a problem?

I know that the traditional blog software doesn't encourage spontaneous answers like you would receive on social media and that blog comments aren’t designed for instantaneous feedback. As well as the delay due to moderation and the barriers imposed due to combat spam, blogs are no longer the right kind of breeding ground for that type of comments any more. Commenting on blogs takes up time and it sometimes feels to me that foster carers are particularly time-poor and that I will have to be satisfied with having readers rather than creating a community of people sharing a common interest. Some say the older the reader, the less likely they will want to express their feelings or expose their problems as comments on a blog. 

I wonder if anybody will comment this week?

2 comments:

  1. It's been awhile since I stopped by - things have been busy around here and I haven't been blogging as much. But I always enjoy reading your posts, you two are so open and honest. I get a lot out of your stories and thoughts, and you help me understand my son (who is not very vocal about hard feelings). And if sharing my feelings means that I am "younger", all the better!

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