Six design principles behind a Steem blog series

This post describes some of the blogging design principles that have emerged for a series of blog posts during the course of a 10 month effort

Introduction

Last April, I posted about a blogging experiment that I began in March. Since that time, I have posted almost daily - and sometimes twice per day - with a new post in the series. The best description that I've found for the series is that it's sort of a digest of timely information on a particular topic. Topics have included music and entertainment, business and investing, and the lion's share have been about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). To see the entire series, you can view the #rsslog category.

It turns out that the series has had mixed results. When people come across it for the first time, responses have been entirely positive and even enthusiastic in nature, and I am very grateful that it has received fantastic support from voters in the STEM tribe.

However, outside of the STEM tribe, Steem's voters have mostly ignored it. The clear message that I'm getting from STEEMPower voters is a nice big yawn. ; -) The absence of interest from Steem blockchain voters makes it difficult to justify the time that I spend on the series. (I'm not complaining. Just observing.)

Before I throw in the towel, however, I'm going to make an attempt at promoting the series by describing some of the principles that are being demonstrated by this series of posts, and why I think they're valuable for the blockchain. And I'm going to ask voters to consider offering support to posts from all authors that implement some or all of the principles that are described below.

In its current form, this series consists of five links and summaries per day. Four of the links are usually drawn from the Internet at large, and one of them comes from the Steem blockchain. The summaries consist of my own, original, descriptive text that's usually in the neighborhood of 100-400 words per link. For any Steem post, a beneficiary setting is applied so that the author of the post that I'm summarizing gets a 10% share of the author rewards. The posts are also set to burn 10% of author rewards by assigning them to @null. After posting, I also share the link on Twitter and I copy it to my pre-Steem blog, with links back to steemit.com, steempeak.com, and stemgeeks.net. (Incidentally, I tried to also start copying it to minds.com, but got banned after two posts with no warning and no capability to appeal. If anyone is under the illusion that minds.com is some sort of a free-speech platform, that would be incorrect.)

So, with all that as background, let me describe some of the design principles that I have begun to make use of as this series has evolved. This is mostly just based on my own intuition, with little backing from literature or formal marketing experience, but I hope it is still useful.

Principle 1: It's all about eyeballs

Goodhart's law has been paraphrased as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

As a play on the attention economy, the way to raise the value of the Steem blockchain is to bring attention to its content - to attract eyeballs. Nothing else will do. Authors and voters who bring attention to the blockchain will increase its innate value. As an author, if I write for the voters instead of the readers, I'm turning a measure into a target and potentially devaluing the blockchain.

So, to the best of my ability, I'm trying to write to attract an audience and just cross my fingers that the voters will eventually agree about the value that these design principles bring to the series' content.

Principle 2: Content should be timely and relevant

Most of the links in my series go to articles that were posted within a few days before the post. On the infrequent occasions where I post older links, it's almost always done because it is relevant to something else that is current.

As a recent example to demonstrate the timeliness and relevance of the content, I'd like to point to this Twitter post. I posted about a topic on January 21, and CBS Los Angeles covered it two days later, on January 23.

Principle 3: Respect the reader's time

Each post in the series now opens with five headlines, so that the reader can tell - in a matter of seconds - if they want to read any further. The headlines are written to be descriptive, not "click-bait". Hopefully, if the reader just reads the headlines and nothing else, they've already learned some small things.

Moving on from the headlines, each section stands alone as a module, so the reader can read just one summary or any number of them up through all of them. Again, if the reader just reads a summary, hopefully they have learned something. If they still want more depth, the post includes the link back to the original article.

Although creating these posts is somewhat time consuming, I post them from my "lite" account, because the goal is to be informative while minimizing the cognitive demand that is placed on the reader. The format is meant to be densely packed with information that is timely and relevant and easy for the reader to navigate.

Principle 4: Encourage discussion and collaboration

As noted in the introduction, when I summarize a post by another Steem author, I also assign them a 10% beneficiary setting. Over the course of the 10 months that I've been doing this, it probably works out that I have shared author rewards with somewhere around 300 other authors.

It is hoped that this example will encourage collaboration on the blockchain, and it is also somewhat consistent with the Steem whitepaper, which says,

Of the key principles used to guide the design of Steem, the most important is that everyone who contributes to a venture should receive pro-rata ownership, payment, or debt from the venture

Finally, this practice also shows off a capability of the Steem blockchain that is unavailable to authors of the other links that are included in the post. If authors from other blogs do happen to follow links from their logs back to my Steem post, they're going to immediately see something that Steem can do and other blogs can't.

Further, because the topics are nearly all selected from recently posted articles, the posts are relevant to the current moment in time, and the variety of subjects funnels opportunities for discussion from the remote Internet onto the Steem blockchain.

Principle 5: Near out of footprint marketing

In the early 2000s, I worked for a major telecom company that wanted to expand its geographic footprint. The strategy they executed to accomplish this was called "near out of footprint marketing". Basically, this meant that they targeted new geographic locations for expansion by finding places that were adjacent to their existing footprint.

For Steem, obviously the geographic footprint is not relevant, but I think the concept is still useful. If Steem's existing "footprint" is in the cryptocurrency space, then adjacent areas include things like STEM, accounting & finance, business & investing, media & entertainment, and so on.

Because the goal is to bring eyeballs to the blockchain, I mostly target topics that might bring eyeballs from the adjacent space of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

Additionally, when I post the link on Twitter, I use category tags that will put the link in front of people who have interests in topics other than cryptocurrency.

I don't know what's a good number, but during the last 28 days, Twitter says that I have made 32.6 thousand impressions, and based on my selection of tags, I'd guess that most of those are people who are outside of the cryptocurrency space, but adjacent to it.

Principle 6: Create connections

In the early or mid-2000s, I read an academic article on the subject of blog popularity. I'll never find it again, but what I remember from it was that blogs that had the most links out to other blogs tended to also have the most links in.

So, the posts in this series always have links out to blogs and sites on the Internet. Hopefully, many of those links will show up in log files, and curious authors or "web masters" will find themselves clicking those links to find out who linked to their blog, and why? Additionally, when people are discussed in the articles that I link to, I often try to find their own personal web pages or blogs and link to those. (As a general rule, whenever possible I try to link to things other than Twitter accounts or LinkedIn pages, where the person would not receive a log notification of the link.)

This is also consistent with the Steem whitepaper, which says,

Content without curation is of limited value. If it had access to all the content of the internet but not the links between that content, Google would struggle to produce useful search results. It is the linkage between information that gives it significant value.

Conclusion

At the risk of seeming self-important, I hope it's apparent that I have put a lot of thought into the design of these posts, far beyond just the daily content. As a result, I would humbly ask other authors to consider incorporating some of these principles into your own posts, and I would ask voters to express their support for posts that incorporate these ideas.

For voters, of course, I'd like to see more support for my own posts from Steem voters, but more importantly, I also think it's important for the value of the blockchain. Therefore, I'd like to see these principles rewarded in anyone's post, regardless of author.

Further, I'd like to say thank you to the small contingent of people who have been reading and commenting on these posts, and to the tribe of STEM voters who have supported them so strongly.

And of course, please consider following @remlaps-lite to get this series to start showing up in your feed. After the disappearance of zappl and steepshot, I don't use that account for much else at this point.

Finally, as noted earlier, you can view the full series at the #rsslog tag. Recent posts from the last 7 days cover topics from psychology and privacy to wildlife and geology. They can be seen here:

Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

Steve is also a co-founder of the Steem's Best Classical Music Facebook page, and the @classical-music steemit curation account.

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