I’m trying to decide what blogging is to me.
I read a fair few blogs and, to me at least, they are inciteful, funny and entertaining. Whether this is the intention or not I don’t know for sure, but I’d imagine it is. I would like to think that my blog has some of the above qualities to someone out there, if not multiple someones.
How do other bloggers get their content? Is it just a journal of their life and they happen to be able to entertain given a fairly everyday and otherwise bland topic, a-la Billy Connelly? Or do they carefully craft their posts, giving them due care and attention before publishing them to the world?
I’m not entirely sure that my blathering is very clear. Being fairly new to the blogging scene I’m wondering where to draw from for inspiration. Possibly, as I’m writing this already, blogging just isn’t my thing, although I’ve always thought of myself as a semi-decent writer and can be fairly verbose on occasion.
I know ‘your blog comes from within’ (or some equally zen-like truism), but I would ask my limited readership: What do you feel your blog actually does for you?
witho | 04-Mar-05 at 3:50 pm | Permalink
I don’t tend to draft, I just open the blogger “create a post” window and write about what’s on my mind.
Sometimes trivial stuff, sometimes more profound.
I often see or hear things that I think “I should post about that”. Sometimes I take pics of things which I find intriguing (I’ve always got my camera phone with me).
So mine is very “ad-hoc”. I don’t really plan what I’ll write or how I’ll write it, I just work from a vague idea.
Blogs are personal things. Sometimes mine annoys me because I can’t express myself as well as some others, or I can’t think of witty or funny ways to say things. Other times I find it helps to write about how I’m feeling to make sense of it. Often, others will be able to relate to what you’re going through and it can be a form of self-validation.
What’s certain is, once you start blogging, it’s very hard to stop…
Colin | 04-Mar-05 at 4:47 pm | Permalink
Bloggers ask this question of themselves and others all the time. The truth is there’s no single answer, people blog for as many reasons and in as many ways as can be thought of.
Sometimes I draft stuff, sometimes i dont. I’m probably much more trivial than I used to be, I find it increasingly hard to do ‘personal’ posts, because i know a lot of my readership in real life.
I tend to post stuff I think other people might be interested in, I try to act as a bit of a ‘news’ site. I’m lucky because my readership is almost ‘built in’, I’ve had a blog for a fair few years now, and over time you tend to build up friendships and get to know people
I think the saying ‘you get out what you put in’ is very relevant to blogging. Keep plugging away, develop your own style, above all IMHO you must post regularly.
I often point people at the excellent article at AlistApart Writinf for the living web, which I think is excellent.
Ian | 04-Mar-05 at 5:17 pm | Permalink
I blog because it’s part of the conditons of my community service.
I mean - it’s not like I was REALLY going to blow up LINX because I can’t get an 8Mb ADSL connection.
lou lou | 04-Mar-05 at 8:26 pm | Permalink
personally i’m a blatherer. i blog complete shite, and some dear dahling folks out there read it. god only knows why cos i’m sure i don’t!
it gives me release, therapy if you like. it keeps me going in my mundane existance.
if you had told me a year ago i’d of been blogging i’d have pmsl….but here i am approaching the first blog birthday and i’m still here. started reading blogs about 18 months ago, happened upon them quite by accident and then i was hooked i guess it was only a matter of time that i took the plunge. i don’t regret it not a second.
em | 04-Mar-05 at 10:12 pm | Permalink
I have several motives or impetuses (is that a word?) for blogging.
1. I like to keep a record of life’s events For Posterity.
2. I’m working on “filtering” these rather hum-drum real-life events via the writing process, distilling, crafting, adding artifice, distancing myself, which is good exercise!
3. I like to write and it’s good for you to do it regularly, daily if possible, even when there’s not much to say–and that might just provide the best exercise to improve as a writer.
You’ve got a good blog Splee, so please keep it coming!
Splee | 04-Mar-05 at 10:53 pm | Permalink
Witho: You’re not wrong. The blog is like an animal that needs feeding. To stop feeding it is to kill it, and we all know the RSPCA will be on our asses if that happens.
Colin: Awesome link man. Thanks.
Ian: Seek help ;)
Lou: One person’s blathering is another’s eloquence.
Em: Thanks for the ego massage. :mrgreen:
RandomJen | 05-Mar-05 at 6:18 am | Permalink
It’s good to question why you do this, periodically and because I do, as well, I’ve been through many incarnations of what I thought it did for me… the latest (cut and pasted below) is the one that feels the truest, given that it’s been a while and now I am comfortable doing what I do, no matter who may see it. That, too, is a difficult thing to come to, knowing - really knowing - that someone may come along who knows you and you’ve made a decision, in a way, to not hide yourself from anyone. (I mean, “me”, in those remarks - it wouldn’t fit with people who write fiction….yanno)
“When I write something down, it starts to make sense to me in a concrete way. It doesn’t solve problems, it brings them to a kind of life that I can move forward with. A way that gives me the ability to transfer solutions, behaviors and ideas to my day to day life in a way that nothing else ever has. A natural way.
I don’t get much feedback and my ‘audience’ is small but the blog works in a way that journals to myself never did because journals to myself were handwritten and less flowing and more external and the blog is inside somehow, maybe it’s just the theory of it being there.”
That’s what I feel in a way I can see in ‘real life’, an actual tangible THING. I am the same in person as I am on my blog - I’ve never been able to be someone else at work at home at play at…… I’m just me. All the time. And sometimes that’s caused me problems but looking back, I don’t think I’d have it any other way.
Having said that, of course, if I’d been any other way, I’d probably say the same thing. The people that I have met in real life from this whole thing have been the same type of people as myself. That may say more about them than me, I don’t know. It’s all very relative. And so very personal, in a way, even though we are in a place the whole world can see us.
I wish you luck. :)
Greavsie | 05-Mar-05 at 12:58 pm | Permalink
I used to Blog because I enjoyed getting attention and making people laugh. It’s evolved since those early, heady days into something quite different and on reflection, what I believe to be very beneficial.
Blogging has trained me to watch a lot more of life rather than just be a part of it. I listen for inflections or nuggets of information, I watch people or situations and I’m more ready to participate.
Alda | 06-Mar-05 at 3:59 pm | Permalink
I ask myself this question all the time. Why bother? Does anybody care? etc etc. And then I may decide, ah, to hell with it, and a short while later I’m seized with the compulsion to blog about something. And it’s enough if just one person reads it.
A fringe benefit I hadn’t considered in the beginning - as one of my commentors put it the other day - is creating your own community. You feel an affinity with others, you comment on their blogs, they on yours, and suddenly you find you’ve got this circle of friends and it’s nice.
But when I get into a ‘blogslump’ it’s a question of keeping the faith, as Colin so succinctly put it on my site the other day. Because eventually I tend to bounce back and love blogging again :)
wedge | 06-Mar-05 at 10:54 pm | Permalink
I basically just start writing sometimes, and very RARELY draft it. When I decide to write on something, I do it, and publish it on one session. The only things I draft are resaerch type things, where i need to check facts, or read more about something.
Mine is very random, and I think I started it because I really wanted to just have a website… and its the best way to get content, is to just make it up. I don’t know how entertaining it is, asd i have gotten mixed reviews, but I get baout 100 hits a week, which is cool with me.
Alot ofthe time, when I can’t get content, i find internet crap, or just post a quick thing about what I’m excited about. Thats why I have a “pic of the day” category. It’s not tecjhnically a daily picture, justa funny one that i can post when i have no ideas.