Thursday, October 9, 2008

Contact Info: A Suggestion for Bloggers

Blogging is a great way to communicate. Right? I dunno. Three times in the last two weeks I've needed to contact another blogger privately (once about something I wanted to buy, once about something they wanted me to sell them, and once about getting involved in a project they'd put out a call for). But I couldn't figure out how, because they have no contact info associated with their blog. Two of those times, they had no email address anywhere on their websites either. Buh? What's the big secret? You're bloggin' aren't ya? Why not go all the way? ;-)

Realizing I should practice what I was about to preach, I checked my Blogger profile and noticed I'd disabled my email address. Today I enabled it to make it easier for someone to contact me "off-blog." Before, I figured they could find my email by going to my profile, then my website, but what the heck, why make people work so hard? (We work hard enough already!)

Will I get more spam? Gosh I hope so! I have such a great spam filter, I so hate not to use it! ;-) No, seriously. I just realized that a really nice recent profile opportunity (in the works) would not have happened if the PR person hadn't taken the time to click through my profile to my website and find my email address there. Let's hope the good outweighs the bad on enabling an email addy on my Blogger profile.

Like good ole Frank Zappa used to say, "I'll do the stupid thing first then you shy people can follow." Or, "Great googly moogly, you gonna do it too!" Or, "Shoot low, they're riding Shetlands!" ;-)
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4 comments:

  1. It's a good point. Strangely enough, many blog templates don't have any place for contact info. I am also surprised by the many blogs without subscription buttons.

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  2. Hi Libby 8-) Yeah. I can understand not wanting your email addy all over the place too, cause of the spam factor.

    But also because maybe it encourages people to communicate ON the blog?

    But that's awkward sometimes.

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  3. I haven't noticed any problems but maybe that's where the spam I get comes from. It's really not much of a problem as most of it gets caught in the filter.

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  4. This reminds me...did you get my reply through etsy? I finally added back a contact link on my website but still need to add it to my blog.

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