:: Jan’s Writing Place ::

I was startled this morning by an alarm alert on my laptop — This Blog is 1 year old today! So, what have I learned about blogging and me? A lot. Here’s what comes to mind.

I wasn’t much of a blog reader before I started this one. I just didn’t ‘get it’. Over the past year I’ve become more intrigued by how blogs are being used:

• personal diaries of mundane - These are probably the most common, diaries like mine, a place to capture and share info with friends, family and strangers who stop to have a look. They sound good and the trendy thing to do. Do they survive? My instinct tells me that activities that take effort, like a blog, either are done out of utility (expected return) or love (intrinsic motivation). I’m not good at the intrinsic bit for this, so my blog isn’t attended to nearly as often as it could be. And to test this idea, go to one of the open blogs (blogger and blogspot, for example) and just page through. Many are abandoned with old dates for most recent postings. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

• promotion of activities - This use of blogs is intriguing to me. As I’ve immersed in the world of writers, this use of blogs to promote their books is exploding. As I understand it, many agents and publishers are strongly encouraging their authors to create and maintain a web presence. Many are using blogs to do this. There are a couple reasons for this. Blog environments provide a lot of tools out of the box that makes a website easy to create and inexpensive. The basic uniformity of structures makes it easier for the reader to feel comfortable quickly. They look for comments areas, recommendations to other blogs (referrals), archives, categories, and calendars.

  Back to the point, using blogs to promote actual activities is also possibly better than a static website. Engaging readers in a comments area makes for much richer communication.

• shared blogs - multi-’owners’ - The operation of blogs by multiple persons was something unexpected that I’ve seen more and more recently, particularly in the writing community. An example is Working Stiffs, http://www.workingstiffs.blogspot.com/ , where a group of contributors take turns posting. The flavour of the content is varied, more like a magazine, and the work is lessened per individual. Another example is Naked Authors.com, http://www.nakedauthors.com/. Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ , a commercial news aggregator and e-publishing site, incorporates multiple blogs akin to op-ed pages that are part of print newspapers.

• blogs attached to commercial interests - What has possibly brought blogging into the mainstream consciousness is the marrying of blogs to other web-based information sources such as television series, films, and print media. Some of the ‘official’ websites include blogging as an extra service for fans. Blogs have also developed outside the authorised spaces, operated by committed fans who can rant comfortably without being blocked by the show’s producers.A more recent development is the use of blogs by traditional or mainstream media as less formal, less jounalistic spaces for discussing events and the news in local communities. This application has come under fire in some quarters as opening the publishers to defamation charges because of the lack of editorial control of the message. The balance of ‘community involvement’, ‘community right to know’, and censorship will continual be a challenge in these ‘official’ environments. Citizen journalism is coming into its own through shared spaces and in my opinion should be encouraged regardless of the discomfort that may arise.

So that’s my take on blogging at this stage. I’m toying with the idea of expanding on this post for an article in PC Update, the magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group.

If you have ideas, please send them along: jwhit@janwhitaker.com . If you disagree, agree, have other thoughts, I’d love to hear from you. Or post a comment here. After all, it is a blog!