Blogging About Blogs

I have a confession to make: I used to work at a very boring desk job (don’t tell my former boss!). I sat in a chair for 8 hours day with about 2 hours of work, so I had A LOT of time on my hands. I couldn’t watch too much tv (but really, thank goodness for Hulu and iTunes!), I couldn’t read a book, and I couldn’t go to sleep. I had to look like I was actually doing something, so I started reading random websites on the computer. I’m not sure how I ended up at dooce.com, but I spent most of a month reading the website’s archives (all the material she had previously posted that was not on the main page). Heather Armstrong, of dooce.com, is the grand-mistress of personal blogs, and her website is a great example of a personal blog transformed into a thriving business. Here is a link to one of my favorite entries (http://www.dooce.com/2009/06/30/familiar-territory). It is long, but totally worth it – not many people can make me laugh and cry at the same time!

Blogs, shortened from the term "web log," started as an online journal - a place for an individual to type up their thoughts and post them online. Many people used their blogs as a substitution for their private diaries – only now they could share their writing with the internet! The genre has quickly evolved. As with many genres, the term “blog” can cover a multitude of definitions. Many of the websites I read every day are some form of blog, but there are so many different forms that I can’t keep track of the differences. My point is that pretty much anything you want to say has a place.
At one point (during my not-so-exciting job), I subscribed to well over a hundred blogs. After cleaning out Google Reader (a program that filters all of my blogs together and lets me know when they have been updated) this summer, I now have only 49. Yes, there are tons of blogs written by people who think you care what they ate for lunch (Frito Pie) and some are not edited well (or at all). However, I have learned so much about such a diverse community through reading blogs that I highly recommend you look into reading/writing a blog.

Things I Love About Blogs

1. It is instant and free publishing! ANYTHING you want to write, all you have to do is hit publish and bam, it is available for anyone with a computer-like device and an internet connection to read. You don’t have to find a book agent, write a manuscript, submit a writing sample, or pay any money. You don’t have to wait for the mail to deliver something, or the printer to eek out ink onto a piece of paper. If something happens to you on your way home from school, it can be published online within 10 seconds (depending on your typing speed!).

2. There are so many choices! You can have a food blog, a gadget blog, a political blog, a short story blog, a photography blog, or a mixture of everything and anything you want. Actually, many of my favorite blogs have lots of different sections – photography, videos, recommendations, reviews, recipes, home improvement, etc. The point is, you can have complete control, no one can tell you what to include or not include.

3. Blogs are changing the world. Seriously! Someone recommends a movie on a personal blog, the word starts spreading, and suddenly tons of people are going to see that movie. There are blogs with tips for being green and recycling, what kind of car you should buy, and what books you should read. Blogs of all kinds are becoming increasingly popular, diverse, and creative ways of sharing information. They are changing the way advertisers view the internet, the way (and speed!) information is spread, and the amount of information available.

So now you know all about my history with blogs. Why in the world would that matter to you? For me, the most accessible type of blogs are the personal ones; people who write about their lives, their interests, their news, and their opinions. The best personal blogs are like the a documentary, a diary, a record book, a short story, a letter to the editor, a movie/book review, a shopping guide, and a stand up comedian all in one. By sharing your stories with the world (wide web), you can assert that your stories are worth listening to, and that your interests are of value. In short, you can create something and immediately share it, creating a community around your creation.

What follows is a close look at the genre of personal blogs. Please keep in mind that one of the really cool things about this genre is its diversity – very few things remain constant among all blogs, but some things are similar in many personal blogs.

A Short History of Blogs: I have a learned a little bit about blogs, but I’ve found a resource that explains with many more details than I would be able to. Rebecca Blood “is the author of The Weblog Handbook, which has been called 'the Strunk & White of blogging books'. It was chosen by Amazon as one of the 10 best books on digital culture in 2002, and has been translated into 5 languages. Her weblog, Rebecca's Pocket, is consistently ranked as one of the world's top blogs. She has been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, Fast Company, the BBC, and National Public Radio and profiled by Time magazine.” Her history of weblogs is available here: http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html but I’ll paraphrase and pull out some interesting quotations here.

Originally, websites “were link-driven sites” with “a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays.” The websites were only created and updated by people who could code HTML (a language for formatting websites).
“Many current weblogs…present links both to little-known corners of the web and to current news articles they feel are worthy of note. Such links are nearly always accompanied by the editor's commentary…Indeed, the format of the typical weblog, providing only a very short space in which to write an entry, encourages pithiness on the part of the writer; longer commentary is often given its own space as a separate essay.”
In 1999, the website began to change, partly because of the introduction of Blogger (the current host of this blog!). “While weblogs had always included a mix of links, commentary, and personal notes, in the post-Blogger explosion increasing numbers of weblogs eschewed this focus on the web-at-large in favor of a sort of short-form journal. These blogs, often updated several times a day, were instead a record of the blogger's thoughts: something noticed on the way to work, notes about the weekend, a quick reflection on some subject or another.” Instead of just links and explanations of those links, weblog authors began to create a community with other personal weblogs. “Cults of personality sprung up as new blogs appeared, certain names appearing over and over in daily entries or listed in the obligatory sidebar of ‘other weblogs.’”
It is important to note that this change resulted in part because “Blogger itself places no restrictions on the form of content being posted. Its web interface, accessible from any browser, consists of an empty form box into which the blogger can type...anything: a passing thought, an extended essay, or a childhood recollection. With a click, Blogger will post the...whatever...on the writer's website, archive it in the proper place, and present the writer with another empty box, just waiting to be filled."
Again, why does this matter to you? Rebecca Blood explains that,“ I discovered my own interests. I thought I knew what I was interested in, but after linking stories for a few months I could see that I was much more interested in science, archaeology, and issues of injustice than I had realized. More importantly, I began to value more highly my own point of view. In composing my link text every day I carefully considered my own opinions and ideas, and I began to feel that my perspective was unique and important.” In other words, because one person authors the blog, that person has the opportunity “ to share his [or her] world with whomever is reading. He may engage other bloggers in conversation about the interests they share. He may reflect on a book he is reading, or the behavior of someone on the bus. He might describe a flower that he saw growing between the cracks of a sidewalk on his way to work. Or he may simply jot notes about his life: what work is like, what he had for dinner, what he thought of a recent movie. These fragments, pieced together over months, can provide an unexpectedly intimate view of what it is to be a particular individual in a particular place at a particular time.”

Language and Style: One of my favorite things about blogs is that you can develop your own language and style. You can be very formal, or very information – it is up to you. You are the author, publisher, and editor of every entry so developing a way of communicating is completely in your control. The important thing to keep in mind is your purpose and audience. What kind of readers are you trying to attract? Does your blog have a theme? If you want to write short stories in hopes of getting a novel published, your style will probably be more formal. If you are keeping a blog so that your family and friends know how you are doing in college, your style will probably be informal.

Grammar and Punctuation: This is similar to the Language and Style section; the grammar and punctuation you use depends on your purpose and audience. I will note that if I click on a blog full of misspellings and half-finished sentences I will instantly click away. There are too many well-written blogs already on the web for me to read something with words spelled incorrectly. Typos, large grammar mistakes, and punctuation errors tell the reader that you don’t care enough about your writing to look over it before publishing. If you want someone else to read your work, you must put the effort into it.

Media and Tools: Obviously a large part of a web-log is the web part; entries are posted on a website for others to see. Posting an entry in a blog format – even a simple one like this – offers some really cool features. Of course you can post pictures in your entries and insert links to other websites, but you can also upload video clips, audio clips, and documents. If you are a musician you can post your latest song and get feedback; you want to take pictures of your dorm room to share with your friends; you can even take a video of the first snowfall/snowball fight and post that. I tend to assume that posting links to other websites is fairly ordinary (like all of the references to Dooce.com in this article), but in fact it is a really versatile tool. Not only can you link to other websites within your entries, you can also link to an individual entry, a company’s website, or your own profiles in other places (Facebook, anyone?). Many bloggers have links to a separate website with all of their pictures (like Flickr), and websites they often visit (sometimes called a blog roll – literally a roll call of cool websites). One big advantage that blogs have over other forms of media is that you can illustrate your ideas. By adding a link, a picture, a song, or a video you can show AND tell, all in the same place.

Visual Design and Layout: This page that you are reading is in a blog format – the original text is available at http://eng101blogging.blogspot.com/. While you are reading about blogs, you are actually reading a blog entry. Let’s start at the top of the page. There is a small bar at the top of this webpage with information from the company hosting my page; Blogger.com offers free and simple blogs to get you started. There is a white box to search for keywords, a place to jump to another blog, and my email address. Underneath that is the title of this blog – Blogging About Blogs. This information, along with the column on the right, is static (which means that it appears on the page no matter what entry you are looking at). Speaking of entries, each section of this article is a separate entry in the blog. This helps me to stay organized, and prevents you from having to read one huge entry. This style of blog (and most other blogs) has the entries sorted in chronological order, with the most recent entry at the top of the page. You can scroll down the page to read several of the latest entries, or you can choose to browse the archives. In the right hand column, there is a list of dates. You can see all of the entries in a blog during a certain month by click on that month. When looking at the entries sorted by month, they remain in the same chronologic format; the last entry for the month will appear at the top of your page. In perhaps the most striking difference between blogs and other text formats, you are encouraged to read from the end (most recent) to the beginning (earliest entries). I think this gives away an important idea behind blogs – what is happening right now is what is important. Most blogs have some sort of About Me section, where you can read about the author. For an example of an About Me page, see Dooce’s example in the Audience section below.

Audience: One of the most important things I have learned about blogs is that you do need to be aware of your audience. Because everything you put online is so easily accessible, ANYONE CAN READ IT. Yes, that means your best friend, the police, and your mom. Even your secret crush, your future employer, and that guy who just walked past you in the library can access information about you online. Heather Armstrong of dooce.com was famously one of the first people fired for writing a blog about her work. On the About Me page of her website, she says:

"I started this website in February 2001. A year later I was fired from my job for this website because I had written stories that included people in my workplace. My advice to you is BE YE NOT SO STUPID. Never write about work on the internet unless your boss knows and sanctions the fact that YOU ARE WRITING ABOUT WORK ON THE INTERNET. If you are the boss, however, you should be aware that when you order Prada online and then talk about it out loud that you are making it very hard for those around you to take you seriously."

I’d like to end this section with one last quote from Rebecca Blood’s essay about the history of blogs. She says that:

"The promise of the web was that everyone could publish, that a thousand voices could flourish, communicate, connect. The truth was that only those people who knew how to code a web page could make their voices heard. Blogger, Pitas, and all the rest have given people with little or no knowledge of HTML the ability to publish on the web: to pontificate, remember, dream, and argue in public, as easily as they send an instant message. We can't seriously compare the creation of the World Wide Web itself with the availability of free technology that allows anyone with a web browser to express their unique, irreproducible vision to the rest of the world...can we?"

Blogging About Blogs

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

A Short (Personal) Introduction

Some Examples of My Favorite Blogs

Analysis of a Personal Blog – Or, Why Should You Care?

Followers

Blog Archive

About Me