My point, and I do have one…

I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time reading about blogging at the moment. Apart from books about blogging, which I’ve been buying for myself and for the library, I also read a lot of blogs, and some bloggers write a lot about blogging.

I always look at How To Blog posts with interest. Many of these, like Paul Stamatiou’s list, suggest that it’s a good idea to have a plan or topic you are going to write about. (My favourite such list is Tony Pierce’s.)

I didn’t start out with any plan or ideas in mind. I was just going to fiddle with blogging software and RSS and all those other tools and see what it was all about. (Incidentally, I believe that the best way to learn about blogging is to do it. I have described it to many people but I don’t think it’s always all that easy to get until you try it for yourself.) I’m not sure how, more than a year later, I’m still here playing on this blog and elsewhere! Actually, I think I know why: I’ve been having fun, and enjoying getting to know other people through this blog.

It’s probably been a snowball effect – because I wanted to investigate and figure out how sites and tools like Technorati, Bloglines, LibraryThing, del.icio.us, Douban, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr (which I just renewed for another year – I must like it!), it was helpful to have my own blog as the guinea pig to try all the new services – and seeing as I had this blog I figured I might as well keep writing for it.

My experience with this blog has been quite radically different to the LiveJournals I’ve played with in the past. I think I got frustrated with them because no one ever read them (except some family members from time to time) – I seemed to be talking to myself, and that’s not really what I wanted. I wanted to interact and communicate with others and see how that would develop. (With the LJs I didn’t interact or talk with others so I’m not sure why I thought they would talk to me. Never mind.) As Dennis Mahoney notes:

The days when simply having a website equated to visibility are over. The average person doesn’t even know to look for weblogs. When someone does, there’s an array of choices so endless that finding your site will largely be a stroke of luck.

I still wonder how my earliest readers found me 😉 Mooiness and Israd, do you care to share how you stumbled upon this blog? Cherry (or should I call you jl) I know you knew about it because I made sure I told you 🙂

With this blog there was a confluence of factors – writing every day (and waking up at 5am everyday meant that I wanted something to do with myself, and that there was time to write!), needing to see how others blogged, and what they wrote about, and then wanting to respond to what they said on their blogs, which then led them back to me, and so on and so forth. Dennis again:

Links and word of mouth can go a long way, but don’t expect a big following right off the bat. You might never get a following. More than ever, you’d better be doing this to satisfy yourself, because it could be your only reward. But if your goal is to satisfy readers, satisfying yourself is a good start.

The more I wrote the more I realised the daily writing practice was helping my writing as a whole. I no longer get stuck writing the simplest reports, and I’ve crazily got two papers to deliver at the conference in September. I think this reducing my fear of writing, and finding likeminded or interesting people, is what’s keeping me going.

I actually started thinking about this post after I read What’s the biggest lie about blogging? Still pondering it. Sorry if you’re a bit sick of this spate of posts about blogging, I’m just thinking a lot about it at the moment. Working late tonight, which is why this post is late, and I’m still at home in my pjs and woolly socks.

P.S. Happy 4th of July to all my American readers! 🙂

Categories: blogging, writing, how, why, navel-gazing