I set up a new blog on wordpress about a week ago, not work related, but a handy opportunity to have more of a play with wordpress. I’ve spent the first week working on it, populating it with content ready for launch, all the usual stuff. As I did so though, something reasonably unexpected happened, I started getting a fair bit of traffic to the site, and even people commenting on what I’d written. I hadn’t yet told anyone about it or linked to it from anywhere, so where were they coming from?
Well, the most obvious source was search engines. I’d selected the option for the blog to be available in search engines right from the start, and some of the content has placed it pretty high in google, indeed higher than the sites to which the blog posts are referring.
Another large chunk of traffic though was coming through the keywords I’d tagged the various blog posts with. People were searching wordpress for these keywords, and getting to the blog that way. In fact once people in the wordpress community had found it through keywords, they started linking to it off their own bat.
So this again has shown another example of the benefits of just using open source software as part of a community platform for e-democracy. If you’re tied into existing large communities with your software, then you stand a much better chance of gaining traffic. This is why I think its such a shame that the ICELE ‘blog in a box’ is not just a wordpress or blogger pre-set template, likewise the Bristol webcasting pilot isn’t just using Youtube. I wonder how long it will be before the open source approach starts to catch on in the world of e-democracy innovation.
