My mom didn’t teach me much about gardening and keeping plants alive. She was never really good at that particular little task in life. In fact, giving her a plant was pretty much like sentencing it to a slow, lingering, miserable death - except when she killed it quickly and mercifully. Not sure what it was but I didn’t get my gardening stuff from my mom.
I got a ton of other things though. I got a wicked sense of Scottish humour - a bit of a dry wit that tends to sneak out when least expected (or in my case tends to hide when least expected). I got that practical Scot nature that says not to waste anything and to make do whenever possible. She was born in Aberdeen, Scotland and I got a sense that there was a lot of history behind us but a heck of a future ahead if we grabbed it. And never, ever give up on a dream. I got the love of reading in a big way from her; books were an essential part of our home and continue to be one of my passions in life. Books weren’t a big part of my dad’s life but my mom’s collection almost approached my own. If you worked hard enough and smart enough, you’d get where you wanted to go. Family was first even though you were mad at them at the time. 
There were a lot of really important things my mom taught me.
Mom is stil pretty clear that you “do it now!” and that you “do it when you’re young enough to enjoy it.” If she thought I was staying around the area to “take care of her” she’d whup my butt. (Mind you, she’d have to catch me first and I can still outrun her and her walker) Nope, my mom is pretty clear that life is to be lived and you had better do it while you can.
She’s still as happy as can be, saying that her retirement home is the best place she could have wound up; that having the freedom to go out but help there 24/7 if she needs it is great. She still loves her music and singing, and can still do a shuffle every now and then when the knees aren’t grinding too badly.
Yah just can’t keep a good Scot down.
One of the things that always annoyed her was Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. She thought they were commercialized and simply marketing exercises to “sell stuff”. So as a kid, we never made a big deal of those things and generally still don’t. A simple phone call usually does the deed. She said if you couldn’t appreciate people through the year, then one day wouldn’t make a bit of difference and the person would know which you really felt.
So. In the old days, we tried to get together as a family on a regular basis and it was a rare week when we didn’t see them at least once. I’ll tell you that my dad is gone now but I still take my mom out to dinner once a week so she can get outside her retirement home walls (she can’t travel on her own anymore). And I know we’re going out for a big ice-cream cone after dinner. Her memory isn’t as good as it once was but she’s happy. And it isn’t Mother’s Day and I didn’t send flowers or a card like the rest of the mom’s got. And she’s likely never read this as she can’t manage a computer anymore.
You didn’t teach me gardening mom, you taught me the important stuff instead.
I love you mom.
One of the questions I’m intrigued with at the moment is, “Who’s an expert?”.
The easiest example to start this question is to look at the television and catch the “talking heads” or “talent” that appear there. We see “experts” trotted out to examine the entrails of just about every major situation - from political to military to foreign situation analysts and even gardening now and then. There’s an expert for everything.
Some of these folks have really “been there and done that” and have expertise to draw on. Some did it a few years ago (or more) and some are still involved. But no matter the level of expertise, the nature of television lends them credence. They’re on the tube so you trust them. Somebody has branded them as “expert”.
I have a personal stake in this at the moment because I’m taking several courses from “experts” and I had to research them pretty carefully before I signed on to give them my money and my time. What’s the point in taking advice from somebody who is simply a talking head and can read a teleprompter well?
And what’s this got to do with blogging and gardening?
Well, I think the same kinds of questions can be asked of the gardening and garden-blogging world.
It is one thing to read a personal blog and know the gardener is telling us something from her own garden, sharing what she’s seeing and taking pictures of. This person makes no pretense at authority and writes for her own pleasure and for a journaling kind of writing. These are great fun.
It is entirely another thing to take advice from somebody who’s giving it as if they know something about gardening. How do you know?
What are the reference points you use to determine that somebody will make a good garden instructor or garden coach? Or are they good talking heads, good garden bloggers, like our well-coifed tv guys? Or do they really know their stuff? What qualifications do you look for when picking a garden “expert”?
Similarly, do you go to garden bloggers to learn about blogging or do you go to those who make a 6-figure income by blogging? What are the reference points you use to make that decision?
You see, here’s the real deal with publishing and television. It’s a business. The person who can give you the best ratings wins. The person who can sell the most magazines wins. The person with the biggest blogging audience wins. The author with the biggest book sales wins. The most attractive-to-the-audience person gets the job given all equal factors in television because looks count in responses/advertising revenues.
The best writer doesn’t necessarily sell the most books nor have the biggest blog. The best gardener may languish unknown because they prefer to be gardening and not doing the social swirl that raises profiles. Being the best at what you do doesn’t necessarily translate into the highest profile.
So how do you decide who’s an expert?
If you write or want to make money writing, (and it doesn’t have to be about gardening) you might want to check out these two -suddenly free - ebooks on copywriting. I paid about $25 bucks for one of them 5 or 6 years ago. And now they’re free.
Check it out and download it here.
But I’m glad I didn’t wait.
OK - you’re bored and not doing what you want to do.
Read this.
My moment was when my kid brother died. I decided then and there that if I had to die young, I didn’t want to leave anything on the table.
My only problem is that I keep adding things to the table and I think there’s more there now then there was then. The older I get, the more I find I really want to do. I have more projects in my radar than I can count. I want them all.
Life’s a giggle.
One of the things I’m really excited about right now is the new way I’m looking at setting up online gardening seminars. A few brave souls stuck around for a few hours of webinars, gave me some great feedback and pushed my thinking into the 21st century. While I’ll be making a video this coming week on that, I thought I’d turn the same lessons to blogging.
So here’s what I’m thinking about and I’d love your thoughts.
The old publishing model went something like: editor gets a thought about subject X. Finds writer. Editor and writer to and fro and work out story details. At this point, the story is between the editor and the writer. (and yes, sometimes the details vary - the writer comes up with the story etc)
Bottom line though, the decision to publish is made by the editor and communication is between the editor and the writer.
The editor involves a support team to put out the magazine.
Magazine printed.
Reader reads.
End of story. Oh yeah, the odd reader writes editor and gets published in next issue.
So the established process goes something like writer>editor>reader.
A New Paradigm?
I think the technology of the Net has really given us disintermediation and that the time and technology is ripe to take full advantage of it.
But for the most part we aren’t.
Most writers (and I include bloggers here) are stuck in the old writer>editor>reader model. What has happened is that the writer has become the writer/editor so the process now looks like writer/editor>reader.
And again, a few folks make comments on blogs but every garden blogger I know laments the fact that only a very small proportion of subscribers actually comment.
There’s a message there folks.
Writer/editor>reader doesn’t fully involve the readership.
There’s still an editor in the process and that editor still stands between the writer and the reader. The writer has become the editor.
Look around the Net and figure out how many websites are written by the writer/editor without regard for what readers want to read. Without regard for what’s important to readers. Writers have become their own editors and make decisions accordingly but it’s still a one-way street. The old publishing model isn’t dead; it has simply moved online.
The power of the Net is such that we can now involve our readers in the process. We can ask them what they want to read, what they want to know and then we can respond appropriately.
The process becomes writer>reader>writer. A circular process and an ongoing one.
I already do this in some small way with my web sites. I use software to discover what folks are looking for in the Net and then I write about those things. My thinking is that if you’re looking for something, then I’ll write about it for you. Over the last 3-4 years, there have been some 3000 pages put up on my sites about just about every gardening topic you could think of - and still folks keep asking new questions. New software lets me take questions and comments directly on my sites and I can answer them right there. Yes, I still make writer/editor decisions but more and more I’m involving my readers in the process.
In that case it’s reader>writer>reader> Fun stuff.
This leads me back to the seminar series where I’m setting up the same kind of system only much more transparently - it is much more direct and obvious. This system is going to be reader>writer>reader>writer>reader>etc. This will be a circular system and we’re going to harness the power of the Internet (as far as I can push it anyway) in an ongoing loop of having readers determine the nature of what they want to know/read. In that case, I’ll be part of the process but not necessarily determining where it will go.
So what’s the point of all this? I think I’ve got a writer>reader>writer process working as best I can on my websites. I’ve got it designed for the seminar series but I haven’t quite figured out how and what to do with this blog, I think blogging is still pretty much stuck in the writer/editor>reader process (with small proportions of readers commenting) and I have to think about that.
My point (and you knew I was going to get there sooner or later) is that the vast majority of garden blogs and websites are stuck in a writer/editor>reader process and will never grow out of it.
Is this important to you? Is this important to your readers? Or is blogging the place for this writer/editor>reader function?
Are blogs the new garden magazines?
So what’s with the changes here? What are you doing now?
I can almost hear some of this type of comment from readers as they take a look at the changing blog layout (again).
So here’s the real deal and my take on one aspect of the garden blogging world as it sits today.
First of all, the majority of readers here are also bloggers. Interesting bit of data but one that’s repeated over and over across the Net. If you read blogs, you tend to be a blogger yourself or involved in some other Net way (forums etc). It’s actually a bit of a loop, garden bloggers tend to talk to themselves and each other a lot. So if you’re not a blogger, this might not be of interest to you and you can stay tuned for an increasing flow of garden related info in subsequent posts. If you are a blogger, let me give you a bit of an insight into how I currently see blogging.
My primary consideration is reader reaction. I measure this with stats packages and other less esoteric ways that don’t concern us right now. If I’m doing my job, my readers become better gardeners or more informed or whatever, but they show me this kind of thing in the underlying stats of the blog over time.
A few months ago, I went with a magazine format and this had immediate impacts on readership. The most glaring was that income went up. I made more money from the magazine format than I made from other formats. Fascinating stuff and I learned a lot from looking at how that happened. But I also learned that my primary objective in involving readers was somehow not working the way I had wanted. And my writing frequency had changed because of the demands of working within a fully featured content management system. it had gone down because it took more time to post. And my readers responded in various ways.
But I made more money.
Let me digress for a minute and tell you about Google. Google engineers are trying to develop a system of evaluating websites using their mathematical formula that mimic a human brain. (Terminator fans - Skynet step one) To do this (in very simple terms as I currently understand it) they divide Googles’ operations into short term and long term memory. And they measure thousands of variables about each website they spider.
So for example, a bounce rate (the time a visitor stays on a site) is an important measure of how visitors react to your site. I’m told the average blog has bounce rate of 75% within the first 3 seconds. In other words, 75% of all visitors will stay on your blog less than 3 seconds. Only about 1% will stay for a minute or more. And yes, this will vary slightly from blog to blog. This is partially because blogs tend to be date oriented. The structure of a blog is date based, with the most recent on top and the oldest hidden. Few folks search for old news or old posts. Google sees this and classes blogs as short term memory. You rise to the top of the search engines fast and you disappear just as quickly on the downslope; put into the supplemental index faster and then dropped faster.
In contrast, websites have hierarchical structures and are not date based. Bounce rates are much better on websites and visitors tend to stay longer. For these and other reasons, Google classes websites as long term memory. You rise slower but stay in the main index longer.
This means if you want to work with Google on short term memory items (news and views) you use a blog. If you want to work with Google on longer term material, you use a website.
So what does this mean for the average garden blogger?
it means that garden blogging is wonderful for some kinds of objectives. If you want to blog to meet other gardeners - an over the backyard electronic fence kind of thing - blogging is perfect. If you want to rant, rave or pass along current news, blogging is great software and Google will short term love you. If you want to pass along many different trains of thought, blogging is perfect. But if you want to write great gardening tips that will be found for a long time, blogging isn’t the software (remember as a rule of thumb, blog posts will be forgotten more quickly than website pages) And while there are exceptions to this; this is the general pattern of how Google treats blogs and websites.
So what’s that got to do with anything here?
Glad you asked. Long term readers know that I’m constantly experimenting, trying to figure out the best technologies to help other gardeners learn and become better gardeners. That’s what I do for a living - for over 30 years now. In one form or other, my life’s work has been to teach gardening skills and promote the use of plants as a lifestyle. This is just the latest incarnation.
So the magazine theme increased my income but reduced other more important variables that I wanted to achieve from this software platform. This means the format really wasn’t working in the long run and it had to be changed. Really, I don’t blog to make money. I established a very long time ago that garden blogging was never going to make enough money to justify the time spent on it. So you blog for other reasons. In my case, I want a fast platform to share news stories, quick tidbits, pictures, video etc. All things of interest but probably not of lasting importance to Google - but things that one of my reader segments like to read and don’t fit on any website or newsletter.
Reader segments? What are you talking about. Well, you know that I have a newsletter as one segment, a forum for some folks, this blog for some folks, a seminar series for others. Everybody learns and works in different ways so my enjoyment in garden writing is delivering systems to help as many as possible. As I said on my webinar video last week, I’m having way too much fun doing all this stuff! Seriously, it’s a lot more fun than digging and selling perennials in freezing rain in April.
I’m very fortunate in my life’s work. I get to work with plants, write about them and actually make enough money to afford a few toys. I love what I do and I try to do the best I can do with the tools I have.
Blogging doesn’t make much money but it’s a heck of a lot of fun and it meets the needs of a chunk of my readers. The magazine format was getting in the way of this so it had to go.
And that’s why I’ve just deleted the magazine format and why this looks pretty plain. I’ll likely search around for another blog theme that catches my fancy but for now, I’m enjoying plain and simple. Back to basics and having a good time doing it.
So stay tuned, I’ve once again started to rethink blogging and what I want to use it for. And you gentle readers will once again, in your own ways, show me dramatically if I’m on the right or wrong track. The only thing I can tell you is that I’m having a great time doing it and I hope you’re equally amused at your end.
Earth Hour is coming up on Saturday, March 29. We’re going to ask you all to shut down your power - all of it - for one hour beginning at 8pm and ending at 9pm.
It’s a small thing but watch this video to get the impact. (more…)
I confess I cheated a little bit with this picture. It really isn’t in my garden at home but in the garden where I happen to be at the moment. (more…)
The Net is awash right now with all the helpful hints (mostly from female bloggers I note) that we should all get ourselves ready for gardening by getting fit. (more…)
There are two plants I want but can’t have (more…)
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