Blazing Minds

Welcome to another Blogger Interview on the Blazing Minds blog, this week I’m proud to bring you an interview with Ashok….

Q: Please tell my readers a little something about yourself?
A: I’m Ashok, a graduate student in political science at a small school called the University of Dallas. I’m currently not in classes – I’m supposed to be writing my dissertation – so I’m away from Texas where I lived for a couple of years during coursework and in New Jersey.

Q: Hi Ashok, so tell me about your blog, when and why you started it and how you came up with the name for it?
A: While I was in classes, it occurred to me that a lot of the stuff I was learning was pretty accessible and should be shared with as many people as possible. This was in late 2005, something like November – I don’t remember exactly because the blog has migrated twice since then, and the first migration was because the server went offline completely and I was lucky and had backups. You can see some of the early posts on my current blog: there’s a commentary on the Gettysburg Address and an analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, for example. The earlier entries try to address more basic questions like “Why should you care about Lincoln? Or Shakespeare?” implicitly. The name of the blog was always “Rethink.” – this was the case because I think a lot of people want to forget they learned in school entirely, and I know the first few readers were being reintroduced to that sort of thing.

The more recent entries are sometimes introductions to more basic things – there’s a post on Plutarch’s Life of “Pericles” that’s a summary of a biography, really. But I think there’s been a tendency to get more technical, too: at some point if others aren’t rethinking, I like to think I am.

Q: Do you find blogging takes up a lot of your time?
A: Yeah, it takes a hefty amount of time. Promotion for something where the first question on people’s minds is “who cares what you think about some old book” requires a lot of tenacity. And if you’ve clicked on those links above, you can see that producing content for this blog takes a lot of time.

Q: Where would you say most of your traffic comes from for your blog?
A: Oh that’s easy – Stumbleupon. If it weren’t for stumble, I would have barely any visitors. And it isn’t because stumblers particularly like my content, either: stumblers hate walls of text, and that’s the style I’ve settled on. But enough stumblers and the algorithm are giving me a chance, and I’m grateful.

Q: Do you use social networks to promote your blog and if so which ones would you recommend to other bloggers?
A: Absolutely you should use Stumbleupon, and not be a spammer there. Try to get to actually know a few stumblers who are interested in your niche and help out as many as possible. I think Reddit can be worth your time, too – just look at what’s successful and see if you have anything similar. Mixx is a pretty good community, Propeller’s links are dofollow – it’s in your interest to use both.

Q: If you could give some useful advice to new bloggers, what would it be?
A: I’m in no position to give blogging advice. There are several times on the blog I’ve tried this, and I’m probably going to have to delete those entries. If my blog makes it anywhere, I might give advice, but I also might not. The thing I’m happiest about regarding my blog is that I use comment luv and it is dofollow: I may not be able to give advice, but people who want to contribute quality comments can get something immediate for their time spent reading.

Thanks Ashok

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 7:31 am and is filed under Blogger Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.