Results are in:
19 people voted on what makes a great garden blog.
68% say it has to have pictures.
26% say technique, method, and info are important.
31% say they want daily ramblings from a friendly, neighborly blogger.
36% say that a unique style is important to them.
10% felt that their territory should be included in the mix of information.
21% say lots of garden news and views make the blog interesting for them.
So there you have it, the sampling was small, but I think it gives me a good picture of the state of mind in the garden blogosphere. We are interested in the far-flung world of gardening and not yet settled into niche blogging -when it comes to climate and geography, anyway. I think pictures have become increasingly important and that reflects what garden-oriented readers want in their books as well. We are still bloggers in outlook and that is why we still enjoy reading each other’s ramblings. That is the part that may change if we follow the stream of the rest of the blogosphere. Blogs are becoming more niche, more “professional” and information oriented. This is the same pattern that personal websites followed, but it may be that there are enough people that enjoy time spent reading and connecting with personal journals that this will coalesce further into its own type of niche of garden blog. We’ll see.
When I started this it was mostly the serendipity of the day and it didn’t take long to work through your blogroll- now garden blogging has burgeoned and the business side of it enters more and more. That can be a service, but if we take that too far it becomes impersonal and loses much of what we most like about connecting with the personalities that are passionate about their gardening. That is meant to encourage those bloggers to keep on truckin’!
Well, for me all this means I will try to change the styling of the blog more and work at getting more pictures in here. Also, I won’t feel guilty when I ramble on about what is going on in my little garden world.
Technorati Tags: blog poll, garden blog
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