Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

This post began life as a “would-be” com­ment to Dave’s pon­der­ings on whether to have an about page. I star­ted to reply and before I knew it, my waff­lings had reached ele­phant proportions.

I know it’s daft and most people think that they’re gen­eric and that no-one reads them, but About Pages are the first “non-blog” thing I read on a site and I get really thrown when I can’t find one.

For me, I need to know what part of the world people are from, whether they are male/female (if it’s not obvi­ous from their username/domain name) etc, I like to know who and what I’m hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with, I suppose.

I tend to view blogs as a form of con­ver­sa­tion, even just by read­ing and not com­ment­ing, you’re still “listen­ing” to the con­ver­sa­tion and are still very much a valid part of it. By giv­ing a ref­er­ence point to read­ers as to who is speak­ing and who they’re listen­ing to, com­mu­nic­a­tion (and con­ver­sa­tion) flow a little easier. I know that some­times you can tell a person’s age/gender/location from their post con­tent and the lan­guage style they use when writ­ing, but not always. Not to men­tion that guess­ing in that way, tends to involve rely­ing heav­ily on stereotypes.

At the end of the day, people read and com­ment on blogs because in the most basic of senses, they give a shit. They may identify with what’s being said, agree with it, dis­agree, find it funny, whatever. It doesn’t mat­ter whether their reac­tion is pos­it­ive or neg­at­ive, all that mat­ters is that the con­ver­sa­tion pro­vokes some­thing — even if it’s just a flick­er­ing of interest that sparks long enough for a per­son to take the time out of their day to read the whole post, and not just the first 2 sen­tences, before nav­ig­at­ing away.

For me, hav­ing a per­son behind the post, by way of an About Page, facil­it­ates a reac­tion neces­sary to gain read­ers’ atten­tion and allows the “con­ver­sa­tion” to con­tinue, as artic­u­la­tion void of any form of pro­voca­tion, ceases to be con­ver­sa­tion and becomes noth­ing more than back­ground noise.

I know that I’ve given up read­ing other’s blogs because their acute anonym­ity made their writ­ing inac­cess­ible and sub­sequently, evoked noth­ing but com­plete indif­fer­ence. Like when you give up try­ing to read a novel because you just can’t “get into it”, the author has writ­ten in such a way that you are unable to con­nect, empath­ise, sym­path­ise, or even taken a fleet­ing interest in the char­ac­ters. You don’t con­tinue read­ing because you don’t care what hap­pens next, you’ve been unable to invest any­thing of your­self into the story. A sim­ilar thing hap­pens with me and blogs that lack About Pages.

I find it dif­fi­cult to invest my interest in blogs where there is no point of ref­er­ence, or indeed rel­ev­ance, to me per­son­ally. Why should people be even remotely inter­ested in what you have to say if they are unable to estab­lish any common-ground with you fairly quickly? I think it is fairly safe to assume that read­ers only tend to read blogs they assim­il­ate with, so it seems con­trary to expect first-time read­ers to trawl through weeks, if not months, of archives just to see if you share the same hemi­sphere, let alone per­sonal politics.

Occa­sion­ally, there will be excep­tions to my “rule”, but these excep­tions occur only by chance: gain­ing me as a reader and as a spec­tator to the con­ver­sa­tion based purely on the coin­cid­ence that they just so happened to be say­ing some­thing of interest to me in their cur­rent post, when I turned up.

Now, say for example that on that day, they blog about Prince. Imme­di­ately, this sparks enough of a reac­tion in me that I may read the post in its entirety and pos­sibly even com­ment. I will also begin to form a men­tal “iden­tity” of this per­son (i.e. Prince fan) and I may the go on to read past posts in the hopes that there is fur­ther common-ground to be discovered.

What if on that day how­ever, this per­son (who still unbe­known to me is very much a hard­core pas­sen­ger on the Purple Pais­ley Party Bus of Mr. Fun­knasty Him­self) instead, posts about the intric­ate and del­ic­ate dis­cip­line of needle-pointing Andy Warhol-esque imagery onto soft-furnishings using skeins of human hair gathered from the des­ti­tute eld­erly res­id­ents of Northern/Easten Europe. Which, has been dyed to gar­ish sat­ur­a­tions using copi­ous amount of “Super Cook” food col­our­ing bought from the Ongar branch of Tesco Metro?

With the excep­tion of the “Ongar” ref­er­ence, I am highly unlikely to think that this other per­son is on a sim­ilar wavelength/planet to myself and will no doubt leave, thus miss­ing out on a chance of gain­ing an acquaint­ance that I may well have found inter­est­ing and could have traded rar­it­ies with, should I be will­ing to look bey­ond their some­what eccent­ric taste in tapestries.

[It’s worth not­ing at this point that Dave was no doubt talk­ing about some­thing of interest the day I stumbled upon his blog. Unfor­tu­nately, it did not involve Prince.]

Answers on a post­card, please.