If you are new to writing a blog, what do you write about, and how often do you write? Well, the simple answer to these questions is, I have no idea. When I thought about starting this earlier in the month, I opened up a few web pages, had a look and found BlogSpot where you can have free web space to launch your blog to possible readers.
I then looked at a few blogs, but most of these were from professionals, and by professionals this can loosely be interpreted as people who earn a living from expressive prose, either in written or spoken form, and who are used to putting their point across on a multitude of topics in a well structured style. If you open up any newspaper web site and read any article you will invariably also find a link to the reporter/authors blog, as well. Same with any of the major TV company websites also, particularly broadcasters, they all seem to do blogs. And of course the content and level of expressiveness is evident in these blogs and is as high as you might expect from people of that ilk. There are also blogs from ‘commentators’ and ‘watchers’ of politics and news stories, where a debate or a question during a parliamentary broadcast is heard and within a few hours a blog is posted somewhere with a 1000 word essay on what was said and what was meant by the debate and or question, in the view of the blogger if not by the owner of the original comment. Carl Gardner, http://www.headoflegal.com/ is an excellent example of this genre and writes some interesting stuff, with lively comment boards taking place afterwards
Then there is the amateur blogger, and there are different categories in this field too. I, as an example, will fall into the ‘rank amateur’ category, someone who thinks he has something to say but then when he has the blog space in front of him, suddenly has nothing to say, looks at the screen endlessly waiting for that inspirational line of thought to re energise the spark that led me to setting up the blog space to begin with, only to find that there is enough open space inside my head to fly a fleet of airships around with no danger of bumping into each other, let alone a good idea for a blog!
You then turn to the blog engine you are on and look at some the blogs here for inspiration and you find that there are blogs by a whole cornucopia of people blogging on a cosmic amount of subjects, there are blogs on:
Cake decoration [ angry birds one is excellent] http://sweetsugarbelle.blogspot.com/2011/04/angry-birds-part-2-yellow-bird.html
Why I am stopping [blogging]
Porn (yes found one)
Bread making
Flower arranging
Politics
Religion
After Life
Sciences
Education
Etc., etc.,
Other amateur blogs I looked at did not actually seem that amateurish to me, What to do, well you could do what I did, which was rehash a couple of thoughts you had already put out there on Twitter and or Face book.... I have both, Twitter, which I have had for about eighteen months but didn’t really do much with, and in reality still don’t. And Face book, well, having a wife and two daughters and a son with the females seemingly addicted to it, from with what I could tell, trivial nonsense, I have very much resisted the temptation to go down that road, until this month, and now, I too have a Face book page, but still find it incredibly hard to join in with any real degree of enthusiasm.
Don’t get me wrong I am not, I hope, being snobbish about this, but I do think that you have to have a part of you that is reduced to the banality of a cartload of chimpanzee. That description, taken at face value can clearly be offensive to all those users of Face book, including my wife, children, nieces and nephews, etc, etc, and it is not intended to be. It’s just that, having seen it at first hand really for the first time this week, I really can’t see what the big deal is. Sure, it has its uses, so too does the fridge door.
I see from my wife’s account that she has over 130 ‘friends’ and that the immediacy of the forum allows them to keep in constant contact, even if it is only a one line message, and there is nothing wrong with a one line message be any means, But it also appears to be voyeuristic in that you have friends of friends of friends looking in and commenting on your ‘posts’, liking or disliking what you have written and giving opinions. (I just realised, after writing that, that of course by publishing a blog that I am inviting the same thing here - but have decided to leave, with this comment to show that I do have double standards) I also saw one of my nieces commenting on a comment on her page, that she hadn’t posted it but that she had been ‘frapped’. I didn’t want to show my ignorance and ask what that was, knowing my girls, from Face book posts at least, I thought it might be something that an uncle shouldn’t know about, or not openly at least! It was left to my wife, a hardened user of the medium, that this was where someone had put a comment on your wall attributing it to you. I didn’t want to ask the follow up question, But how can you do that when it is your picture that appears on the post’, I fear that will just make me look more dumber than I think I am!
Anyway, that has nothing to do with posting a blog or not, and that is what this post is all about. Wait, maybe that is the trick, if you are new to blogging and you do not make a living from being erudite and intelligent, is it just possible that you open up your blog, to begin with at least, and just ramble. Work your way into it until you develop a theme and find your rhythm and hope for the best, Well, maybe not, but, I think that might just work for me, we will have to see how it develops...
Of course there are other questions that you need to ask yourself when thinking of doing a blog, for example:
Why? why do you want to do a blog, if you are not a 'professional, with something worthwhile to say. Is it keeping up with the Jones', someone you know is doing one and you feel that you need to do it too?
Who are you targeting the blog at? Do you have a specific audience who you want to target your blog at, and if so how do you go about getting it to them?
How often do you post? Daily, weekly, monthly?
I am not going to try and answer these questions, all I can offer is that some people do it daily, some do it as the mood takes them and some do it when they have something of consequence to say. But, I will probably fall into the category of infrequent rambler with no specific demographic targeted. True, I do put a link to new posts on Twitter and Face book, and whether anyone rewards my rambles with actually reading them.is a matter for them. My original idea of Blogging was to vent at things that annoyed me, have yet to do that, although plenty of things do annoy me, Royal Weddings for one, Politicians for another. Didn't I read somewhere recently that Belgium has been 'governed' by professional civil servants as the electorate failed to elect an outright winning party! If that was the case, why can't we just do that here, think of the money we would save both in Mp Salaries and more importantly expenses, see that's what I mean, rambling and disjointed, but you can see where I am going. And maybe, just maybe, if you are not a professional, that's what a blog should be, just a series of rants and rambles about any subject that takes your fancy, whether it be family, friends, a daily photograph, or just to get something off your chest.
If someone reads it and likes it, fine. If someone reads it and doesn't like it, that's also fine, and if they tell you they like it great, if they tell you they don't like it, well, so what, you wrote and posted what was on your mind and they replied with what was on their mind after reading it, let them do it and move on to the next one.
Happy blogging!
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