This is my first (and hopefully not last) post for the Reader Appreciation Project and so I thought I would try to take the outsider’s view. I imagine that after a few months of blogging everyone has questioned at least once whether it is all worth it and so the proposition I am going to examine is this:

The ideals of reader appreciation are great; but to do so much, for so many, for so little reward just isn’t worth the effort. Someone who is putting in so much effort must have an ulterior motive.

So why is it that people expend so much time and effort for the benefit of others?

I think it is a combination of four reasons:

Fear of success

The problems of success are no less than those of failure; they are just different. Giving away content for free and hoping for advertising revenue lets you succeed or fail in private without obligations to others.

Avoiding the mundane

One of my favourite shows is one where amateur cooks compete to prove they can cut it as great chefs and, without fail, they all want to convert their passion into their job.

Not everyone can successfully transform their hobby into work, and many shouldn’t. There is a risk of turning something you care about into an obligation and ruining it in the process.

Fame

Blogging can do wonders for your reputation as an expert. If you want to be considered an expert, get published, headhunted, or just gain the respect and adoration of your peers, then giving your content away may just help you achieve that.

True community spirit

I’ve left this until last for a reason. I am in awe of bloggers who appear unconcerned with power, fame and money, and they do exist, but I am a sceptical soul and I think this is usually only a small part of a blogger’s motivation.

All four of these reasons play a part in my motivation; fame is at the top of the list. I live and work in an environment where I am known for my knowledge of regulations, but it is one where people just don’t understand my knowledge of programming and the internet.

Blogging is my way of gaining respect for that aspect of my life.

If you are a blogger, what is it that motivates you to give back to the community and to appreciate your readers? Do these four come into it?

If you are a reader, do you think any less of me, or any other bloggers, because their appreciation of you may be driven by selfish desires or fear?

Finally, is there any motivation for giving back to the community that you would find unacceptable?

A short time ago I had a brief discussion in the comments of this post about trackbacks at Reader Appreciation Project, about the usefulness of trackbacks. My main contention was that most trackbacks relate poorly to the author’s opinion and so were usually not very useful.

My understanding of trackbacks has moved on a lot since then. I spent a good few hours yesterday trying to put into practice what I thought would be a beneficial concept only to find that my knowledge of trackbacks was limited, at best.

One of the things I didn’t understand was the difference between a trackback and a pingback. I thought they were just terms for the same thing. I was wrong. For those who already know this you might want to skip ahead a few paragraphs.

Trackbacks

When WordPress sends a trackback (by being explicitly told to by the author) it sends the target blog the url of the post, an excerpt of the post, the post title, and the blog name.

The receiving blog then processes this for security, limits the length of the except and adds it as a comment, albeit one marked as a trackback.

There are some flaws in this approach, the key one being that there is no verification that the post on the site sending the content actually even exists, and even then the content could be pretty much anything. You can moderate them, but you shouldn’t have to.

Pingbacks

Pingbacks are really trackbacks version 2. When WordPress sends a pingback it only sends the url being linked to, and the url being linked from.

Once the pingback is received, the receiving blog connects to the url being linked from, finds the url being linked to within the post content and then uses that as the context and grabs 100 characters or so from either side of that point.

This is the content displayed in the comments of the blog.

Resolving the problems

As you can see these are two very different things. They both aim to create a connection between the posts but neither help to add to the conversation very much.

My idea was to make pingbacks a little more useful by amending the text served to the blog when it came back to get the content. I figured that while I was adding to the conversation by writing a post I really wanted a brief summary of my point to appear on the target post so it could play a useful part in the conversation.

Now, you might have figured out by now that all my hard work is fairly pointless. What I was really searching for was a way to add to the conversation on the target blog while pointing participants back to my own site for a more thorough consideration of my points.

Most people would call this a ‘comment’.

So this is the conclusion I have come to. The idea of automating these links is fine in principle, but really not necessary.

If I am writing a, “hey look at this”, post then why does anyone already at that post need to know? They don’t.

If I am writing a, “dude, you’re wrong”, post then I really want to summarise my position, to allow others to carry on discussing it. I can do that in a comment.

What else is there?

So what now?

I only really have one idea for the future. There is something that I think can bring improvements to the linked together of posts.

If I write a post in direct response to someone else’s then I would like to be able to create a short summary in their comments and specify that my comments have been expanded on in a longer article. I would also provide the URL. More than that though, I would like people who comment on that summary on the original post to have the option to include their comment on my blog, and people who comment on the post on my blog to have the option to include it on the target blog.

This would create a much better connection between the posts, and more importantly, the conversations.

Over the past few weeks the talk about using WordPress as a platform has intesified, especially with the release of Prologue. This has really got me wondering how far you use WordPress to replace all those social apps that have become so popular.

If you’ve known me for a while you might know that I have a thing about de-centralised, self-hosted services; I have had ideas in mind for a long time about chaining blog searches, i.e. when you search my blog, it also connects to my friends blogs that I think are related and provides some of their content, and so on.

I have an idealised view that perhaps in future we won’t need people like Google at all, and while that may be just a pipe dream I do think there are some areas where that can be reality.

One of my major gripes with all of the social networking sites is that popularity seems to be the be all and end all. While it adds weight in some areas it also means that the really interesting stuff often gets lost. I have never found Digg to be even remotely useful for example.

By decetralising these services so that you plug into your friends bookmarks, and aggregate those, perhaps the worst aspects of the existing sites will disapear.

Imagine your own version of Digg, featuring links from the people you hold in the highest regard and ignoring the trolls and the unwavringly one sided.

This is obviously a very speculative post so far, but I do intend to explore this area more over the next few months, hopefully with some examples I can let everyone have to play with.

I have updated my Fun with Sidebar Tabs plugin today to include two new features.

The first is that it will now degrade if Javascript is not turned on. It does this simply by modifying the class on the container. The layout is still accomplished solely with CSS.

The second change is that it is now possible to overide the default CSS for each tabbed section that is included.

For each tabbed sidebar widget that is added to a sidebar you can open the options panel using the icon on widget and alter the CSS. The CSS is broken down into 5 areas:

• The position of the tabs relative to the container;
• The basic tab styling;
• The selected tab styling;
• The hovered over tab styling;
• The content container styling;

To help understand what can be changed the default styles are included in each box to begin with.

It is also noteworth that I am now eating my own dogfood: the home page of this site is now using the Tabbed Sidebar to link to plugins and tools.