I wasn't exactly a stranger to blogging when I started this assignment. I'd kept a LiveJournal sporadically for a few years, and I occasionally read other blogs, though not many.
There seem to be some subtle differences between the LiveJournal community and the rest of the blogosphere, so I decided to start a new account with Blogsome rather than attempting to use my LiveJournal for the assignment.
I expected the experience to be a little different from LiveJournal, with perhaps a slight difference in the audience dynamic and in the sense of purpose.
Finding a purposeAlthough the assignment instructed that our blogs should be about something, I found it difficult to pin down a purpose for my blog, other than the obvious purpose of fulfilling the assignment. I never came up with a solid, compelling reason for my blog, as is advised in the List Apart article 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web.
I suppose in the end, my purpose became to entertain, since I wrote many of my posts with the thought of making them funny somehow. I won't comment on whether I think I succeeded in this.
I never settled on a solid topic. I'd considered choosing a specific subject to follow and blog about, but I couldn't think of anything that I had enough interest and authority in to blog about on a regular basis.
I'm not sure if choosing a specific topic would have helped or hindered my blogging. On one hand, it might have taken some of the difficulty out of trying to decide what to write about each week. On the other hand, it might have given rise to a whole new line of thought: "Do I really know enough to blog about this? Is anyone even interested in reading my opinion about this?" Or, "Oh, I have to blog about that again."
In the end, my blog was simply about random observations in everyday life.
But who cares?Another uncertainty going into blogging was who would actually want to read my blog. Going in, I already had a small audience consisting of my professor, a few of my classmates from 444, and a few people I managed to draw over from my circle of LiveJournal friends. But beyond that, I had no real concept of who would see my blog and who I wanted to see my blog. Did I want to draw a larger audience, or did I want to keep it more or less in the same circle of people?
And more importantly, how could I keep these people interested in what I had to say?
I never really answered these questions, but I did try to keep one thing in mind: I did have an audience. This audience, small as it was, was what distinguished my blog from just another personal journal, and my awareness of it affected my writing significantly.
Whenever I wrote, I thought about whether my audience would want to read what I had to say, and I tried to think of what I could do to make it interesting for someone else. I tried to avoid writing simply to rant or complain, because reading a lot of that sort of thing in someone else’s blog tends to drive me away. I tried to put an amusing spin on what I wrote.
Blogger’s blockAnother difficulty I encountered was finding the motivation to blog every week. I'd like to pretend that I managed to blog every week without fail, but ... I didn't.
One of my problems was simply thinking of something to write about. As I said, I tried to limit myself to topics that I thought people might actually enjoy reading about. Although this policy probably improved what I did write, it also contributed to a severe case of blogger's block. Many of the blogging ideas I did come up with, I abandoned because I thought no one would want to read them.
I think another reason I had trouble coming up with ideas was I simply wasn't thinking like a blogger. One thing I've observed while browsing the blogosphere is that some bloggers seem to walk around with "I'm blogging this" written across them. When something noteworthy happens to them, they make a mental note to blog it. Even better, they manage to find something blogworthy in ordinary things that most of us wouldn't think of writing about.
For the most part, when I observed something interesting or odd, I didn't have an impulse to blog. Because I never got in the habit of making that mental note, I usually forgot about the observation or event when I sat down to blog.
We all have things in our lives that we can talk about – and that someone, somewhere, will want to hear about – but sometimes we don't notice because we're not looking for them. I call this nothing-ever-happens-to-me-itis.
Another possible cause of the blogger's block is the complete lack of privacy that the Internet affords. As I embark on the great post-college job search, I'm very wary of who might be looking at my blog and what image I'd be projecting as a professional. As a result, I was very careful – perhaps overly careful – about what kinds of things made it into my blog.
Complaints about work, for example, were out of the question. Not only could my coworkers come across my blog and take offense, but potential employers could find it, too, and take note of my unprofessional conduct.
Over the past few months, a few of my friends had issues with the "wrong people" stumbling upon their LiveJournals, and this put me even more on guard.
Tinkering with technologyI experimented with a few blogging tools over the course of this assignment.
First, Blogsome. I chose Blogsome because my professor offered it as a more challenging alternative to Blogger. I found starting and updating my blog through Blogsome to be easy enough, but I did run into some difficulty when I tried to mess with templates. It appears as though I should be able to use any WordPress template that I come across, but I still can’t figure out how to access Blogsome through an FTP client, which the site claims is possible. I found nothing in the way of documentation on the site. Still, this was a minor setback; I still had all the Blogsome-provided templates to choose from, and I could edit them manually using Blogsome’s interface.
Another tool I found useful was Bloglines. This allowed me to gather a small collection of blogs I liked and to keep track of their updates without having to visit every single site all the time. I also added a Bloglines button to my blog so users could easily subscribe to my RSS feed.
A friend recommended subscribing to Site Meter. This allowed me to track my site traffic and to see where my readers were coming from. Unfortunately, my statistics from Site Meter are off because I accidentally deleted the code while switching templates and didn’t immediately notice its absence, so the numbers are about what they were a month or two ago. Still, this technology allowed me to see my visitors’ locations and, usually, the site that linked them to me. Most of my visitors were from the local area, but I also got hits from Ireland, Malaysia, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, Hong Kong and Sweden.
Although I decided not to use LiveJournal for this assignment, I did set up a syndicated LJ account so my LiveJournal friends could still add my blog to their friends lists. This helped me keep my friends updated.
Blogsome vs. LiveJournalAs I mentioned before, the differences between LiveJournal and the rest of the blogosphere are subtle at best. LJ is a blogging tool, but it tends to create a more close-knit community than, say, Blogger.
One difference seems to be that LJ users don’t expect or particularly want to be linked to blogs outside of LJ. When I was creating my list of favorite blogs for my site, I hesitated to add any LiveJournals to my list. Also, LJ users often don’t read blogs outside the site’s community. I found it difficult to draw readers from my old LJ to my new blog. Setting up the feed helped, but I doubt everyone I knew on LJ made the switch. LiveJournal is very like, but somehow separate from, the rest of the blogosphere.
Final thoughtsI found this assignment to be fun but challenging. Although I suffered from a nasty case of blogger’s block, I was pleased with my blog overall and enjoyed fiddling with the technologies introduced in the class. I probably will keep up with my blog after this class is over.
