The Birth of an Intellectual Blog

by Sean J. Vaughan

Reason and Rhyme is in it's second quarter of life. We've posted over 100 articles, submitted about 50 times to 10-20 different blog carnivals, submitted articles to social bookmarking and article popularity sites and more. We have learned a lot about creating and managing a new blog and I'll try to share all of the major lessons with you, our authors and readers in this post and several future posts. There is a lot to cover! Therefore, I will cover various aspects including our traffic statistics and attributes, what articles get read the most, tips for finding readers, blog carnivals, our site features for connecting with readers, and more.

The Blog Ecosystem

The most popular and successful blogs are blogs about blogs. That seems both sad and understandable; with over 50 million blogs out there, somebody needs to tell us what blogging is, where to find them, and how to do it. More generally, the most successful blogs are about the Internet and technology. Anything about Google; Search Engine Optimization; web advertising; personal technology including cell phones, personal computers, digital cameras, etc.; Web 2.0; social bookmarking; all are blogged about ad infinitum it seems. And that's all well and good. But boring.

And, that's not us. I'm very pleased with where we live in the blog ecosystem. The uniqueness of our authors and their contributions gives Reason and Rhyme it's distinct identity which is as it should be. There are certainly still many other similar blogs but I'm proud of how Reason and Rhyme compares and our growth shows that there is a place for our creations in the blogosphere.