Friday, February 15, 2008

Blogging? Whose idea was this anyway?

By Lonnie Cruse


Whose idea was it to create weblogs or blogs, as they are called? I haven't a clue. But they are all over the Internet and often competing with each other for readers. And let me tell you, it is NOT easy coming up with ideas to post about that other people will be willing to take some of their valuable time to read, whether it's a personal blog and you have to think of something relatively sensible to say every single day of the week or a group blog like this where you only have to be relatively sensible once a week, BUT you can't repeat what the other bloggers already said. Finding guest bloggers, people to interview and post about? Same degree of difficulty. So why do bloggers blog?


A. Because we like to write and/or talk to anyone who will listen.

B. Because we like to connect with readers and other writers and share thoughts/ideas.

C. Because we like to write about other things besides our characters and plots.

D. Because we think we have something of value to say.

E. Because we have more time than sense.

F. I ran out of becauses


Keeping up a weblog is a big responsibility and it takes a lot of time. Time that probably should be spent writing. But, you know what? It's a lot of fun, coming up with ideas, pictures to match, posting them, and reading comments from our readers. Some days it's frustrating when the blog site is on the fritz and you lose an entire post you've tried to save or some other disaster strikes. And recently a "robot" targeted PDD as a spam site and we had to deal with typing in little letters that appeared in a box every time we tried to post, just to prove WE were real people, until we complained to Blogger and they did the "Oops, sorry," dance. But I know all of us here at PDD enjoy sharing our thoughts with you, finding interesting guests for you to meet, and just plain hanging out here. Sort of like a virtual coffee clatch. Virtual cinnamon roll, anyone?

5 comments:

Elizabeth Zelvin said...

Two of my favorite things about being a Poe's Deadly Daughter: feeling like a journalist with a column, a word count, and a deadline every week--and now I'm working on my virtual book tour for Death Will Get You Sober, the skill of turning 'em out on demand is coming in very handy--and saying "my blog sisters." :)

Sandra Parshall said...

My favorite part of doing a blog is having an excuse to ask other writers nosy questions in interviews. I would do an interview every week if I could -- so much more interesting, at least to me, than my own ramblings! It's hard to tell, though, whether interviews are appreciated by our readers. I can only hope they are.

Anonymous said...

A meta-post!

I sometimes think a tightly focused blog has an easier time coming up with subjects than a more scattershot blog. With the tight blog you always know your subject. With the other kind, you have the leisure to not be sure what to write about.

Kim Smith said...

I'll have a roll please. Yanno... I am having a spam fight over on my blog. I keep getting these medical posts, and seriously, one day, I found 240 posts to my blog, that I had to delete. Sigh. I wish I knew how to get them to stop.

Holly Y said...

I am beginning to experiment with blogging because of the opportunities to connect with people. What a brave new world, where we can throw our thoughts out there, like an open diary, and others get to comment to us!