Richard Metzger, editor of the always interesting and enviably up-to-date blog, Dangerous Minds, offers me pithy and much appreciated advice e on blogging (based on my 3-question format — see Ed WInkleman interview). If you don’t know Metzger’s previous work with the infamous British cable TV show, Disinformation, his penchant for getting the coolest, weirdest, and hippest to talk and share (among them Kenneth Anger, Robert Wilson, Marilyn Manson and Kembra Pfahler) is legendary.
JH: Can you tell me how and why you came to start your blog?
RM: After I sold out of Disinformation, I’d been in discussions with a cable network about doing a talkshow with them, but that fell through, so after I was “guest blogger” at Boing Boing –and had a lot of fun doing that–my wife Tara McGinley pressured me into starting a blog and doing the talkshow online. She was really more the impetus behind it starting up than I was.
JH: Based on your success, what advice do you have for someone starting a new blog these days such as moi?
RM: You have to continuously post, all day long, so it helps if some like-minded people are involved with your endeavors. If you think of the really popular blogs, what they have aside from abstract concepts like “quality” or “coolness” is that they post frequently. It’s like shoveling coal into a furnace. If you aren’t posting (and then using social media to alert readers to new posts) your traffic will never get that big. But if you have a reputation for constant updating–and “quality” and “coolness,” too– this helps a lot.
And you have to link back to where you found stuff. An ecosystem of like-minded blogs will send traffic to one another.
JH) For those that don’t know the real you, perhaps you might share with everyone something silly and personal like what you sleep in at night, and/or what you guiltiest food pleasure is?
RM: What I sleep in isn’t very interesting, tee shirt and sweat pants or whatever, but we do sleep with two completely adorable little puppies who fit between us like bed-warming puzzle pieces.
Tara and I are both really into Ethiopian food because we live in the Little Ethiopia neighborhood of Los Angeles. I never get sick of it and neither does she. We also eat a lot of curries (Tara’s a great cook) and there is a great soul food take-out place near us called Chef Marilyn’s 99 Cent Soul Food Express that we like a lot.
