Why do we Blog?
I love blogging, both writing and reading and hopefully, interacting with other people, bloggers or not, through comments. What makes a good blog for me? Words like interesting, quirky, fresh, well written and, mostly, personal come to mind.
What do I mean by personal? Well even if someone is writing about some thing, I like it if, in the way that they tell it – I learn something about that person. As I said in the previous post, blogs were conceived as nothing more than dated entries – diaries in effect, and though they have gone in many other directions since then, some people still use them as diaries. If you read such a blog, then you don’t need to ask the question which you might ask upon reading an old-school paper diary. Did this person write for themselves or did they have a view to publication and a wider readership? If a blog is published, made public it’s author hopes to be read. Those that are published privately are equivalent to the old private diaries – anyone keep one of these? Please, comment and tell us how it is for you and why you use digital to diary… One group who keep private diaries but with an eye to their future readership, are politicians who mine their diaries for their autobiographies. Do you use your blog – refer back to past posts – do tell!
I have no time for those who say they don’t read or watch fiction because fiction is the one way we have to see what it might be like to be someone else and some blogs can offer this too. I would go so far as to say that story-telling is one of our fundamental human characteristics – “Look! These paw-prints show that a lioness, oh and her cub, passed this way say, 3 days ago and she was limping.” A story formed in our big brains. They say that 80% of our big brains developed to work out what other people were going to do next – that all the other things we accomplish are byproducts of those big brain capabilities – transferable skills! I think that storytelling whether aural, novel, short-story or blog, is one of those defining characteristics of humans that emerged as byproducts of our need to understand “the other”. Never be afraid to share your stories…
Many blogs fall by the wayside after a few posts, a few months, and that is reminiscent of those New Year’s Resolution to “Keep a Diary” but then sometimes you catch the habit, your life’s schedules permit the space to write without struggle and best of all you find it rewarding either for yourself or because you get feedback from others. We all like interaction, but building an audience is hard work and it has to be said that Blogger does not make it easy to find other people – only by searching one “interest” at a time and sometimes it would be nice to conflate two or more – for example, science buffs who also play the ukulele and crochet…
I was spoilt by the experience of my first blog Ripple, hosted on Mo’time. Mo’time was a small blog operated by the manager of a large Italian blog which he used as a testbed before incorporating new wrinkles into the main one. I say small but if I remember correctly, some 10,000 bloggers had started blogs but due to the aforementioned rapid attrition factor, it seemed like there was quite a small core of stalwarts. A more accessible listing made it easier than Blogger to connect and befriend other bloggers. Sadly, the main Italian blog was sold and after a couple of months, the new owners closed down Mo’time. We were bereft at losing our eclectic community bunk-house and some of us tried to find alternatives and a few have ended up staying in touch via Facebook – a scattering of friends around the world…
So! Here I am having picked up this blog again after a few years when writing didn’t seem to fit, liberated by the lockdown and determined to complete the A to Z 2020 Challenge and hoping to make some new friends – hit that comment button, please!