Linking my blogs

I wasn't sure about this. Most of my blogs are interconnected, so you can flit around all of them if you want to. The exception is my one 'diary' blog, which again is themed, not just a list of all my 'daily doings'. You'll maybe notice there isn't a link for it on this blog presently, though you might find it if you look hard enough.

I, kind of child-like, created some business card type things to give to people when I started this project, but so far the only people I've given them to have been my boyfriend and my best female friend. The problem is, I don't necessarily want everyone I know to know everything about me. Yet this runs counter to my thinking on the topic of honesty and the way I want to shape my blogosphere 'land grab'. *Ponders*

Inviting the World into your living room

Anil Dash's article has me thinking about the parameters I want my various blogs to have. Subject is already defined - I have different blogs for different topics, all of which I have some degree of passion about. I hope my passion is evidenced by my 'voice' in each of my blogs.

Who may stumble across my blogs and whether they become regular readers or commentators wasn't something I knew to consider when I set out on this journey. In some ways it wasn't relevant, or I might have considered it. The point, for me, is to make the journey and to experience what blogging is about, plus I have enough ego to want to give my opinions and express my feelings about the things I have a passion for.

I didn't know, until I listened to Anil's presentation, that some bloggers do regularly correspond with those who comment on their blogs, though I did ponder this when I posted about 'blog etiquette' a while ago. I hadn't really thought about that, or about how willing I was to talk to (potentially) the whole World. Equally, the idea of the whole World trudging across my living room carpet is rather horrifying.

I am guessing, though, that the reality is inevitably going to be smaller scale. Certainly if people are going to become regular visitiors they must have an interest in my ramblings, so 'common interest' will act as a filter to start with. Of the people who visit, apparently only around 1 in 8 will actually leave a comment, so that is the next filter.

So far comments have been limited to 'nice site' or waves from face-to-face Friends, so not a lot there to correspond about - filtered by whether a comment is of a nature to require a response.

My final filter will be whether your comment is of sufficient interest to me that I can and will spend the time to respond. Regular commentators who have something of value to me to say and who mind their manners are the most likely to actually make it into the category of people I will correspond with. I will correspond, since I love letter writing, though I am notoriously bad at doing so in a timely fashion and tend to write a lot when I do write.

Having done the chat experience, I also prefer corresponding with real people who I might eventually manage to meet face-to-face, even if that might involve travelling a bit further than to the local shops.

Audience and purpose in blogging

I recently listened to a podcast by Anil Dash (of Live Journal fame), discussing what a blog is / can be and what purposes they serve.

I found it here:

http://neologies.blogspot.com/ and at MeshForum2006 http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1069.html

In the podcast he talks about the expected use for blogging - 'citizen journalism' versus it's use more common use for social networking.

Interesting statistics offered suggested that the ratio between writers and readers (of LJ) is in around 1:6 or 1:8 and that a big factor in obtaining and keeping an audience is shared context / interests. Dash suggested that real influence is not about how many people you reach, but how relevant and meaningful the site is to the people who do use it.

Apparently most people like to read something they feel is 'exclusive', whilst authors can usually only cope with corresponding with a certain number of people within their blog social network. Dash indicated that the most correspondents people seem to be able to handle is about 150, and observed that "Nobody has 1,000 friends". A strategy he did suggest for handling large audiences was to offer them an opportunity to be part of the exclusive 150 you do choose to correspond with.

Gossip / reminiscence were cited as the two most common types of content for blogs, the minutiae of people's daily lives, and a comparison was drawn between the content of blogs and the content of 'historical' letters now held to be important.

Not surprisingly, there are indications that frequency of 'hits' is related to the frequency with which you post, and some readers will visit a site several times in a day.

A member of Dash's audience asked if, because the majority of bloggers are young females, whether a 'Feminisation' is happening, since many bloggers use their blogs to express their feelings, and was there now a change occurring in people's perception of 'what matters' ? Dash indicated that a trend of undervaluing the degree of influence blogging has exists, and that blogs are actually now competing with the more traditional news media.

What I refer to as 'voice' was also discussed - what tone people write with, what behaviour they exhibit in their writings and what they will tolerate in comments. The parallel was drawn about blogs being your 'living room' - that by operating a blog you are inviting people into your living room for a conversation, and how people are expected to behave in that context, including how the author behaves (For example, if you swear at home then maybe you are going to use bad language in your blog test as well).

Sustaining blogs was also commented on, and Dash seemed particularly interested in how blogs are affected by changes in audience / changes in your 'voice' / people projecting their lives through you, you being public property. Commercialisation of blogs and 'selling product' were also topics discussed and Dash gives a very interesting account of how his audiences reacted when a move was made to charge for some LJ-related products.

It's a really interesting article, if a bit long, so please do have a listen. I'll be posting my own thoughts on some of the topics covered in due course. Please cut me some slack, though, since I am very new to blogging and I had never even heard of Anil Dash 'til I tripped over this article. I'm not informed enough yet to get into discussions of how much of an authority he (or others) may or may not be on such topics.

Metacognition - Thinking About It

Interesting blog discovered on the topic of elearning, called Internet Time Blog, so I've put it into my links list.

Metacognition is really important to what I do for a living. I teach people to do it. I try to do it myself. To do it you need to be self-aware and conscious of how you learn. I'm a very reflective person and I like stuff like this.

This blog of mine is about thinking, about questioning, about learning. Part of it is about recording what I've learnt about blogging and where I've learnt it from, hence the 'Experiencing the Blog' posts.

Questioning is a really important activity. I learnt this in my first job. I started out with a research job. It was a great job, but a fixed contract, so I couldn't stay doing it forever. I learnt never to trust a source without checking out it's credentials and without cross-referencing to other sources. I learnt that some sources are more reliable than others, and that some writers have better credentials than others when it comes to the accuracy and quality of their information. I'm trying to apply this when I look at how other bloggers do things. I'm also trying to make what I write interesting !

Experiencing the Blog 4

People are beginning to find my blogs now, which is really pleasing. Masquerading as Me has been picked up on most. People have been quite complementary about the content and forms so far, which is also nice. I don't know if there is an etiquette for acknowledging comments, though ? I might need to look into stuff like that. My thanks to those who have responded so far, your comments are much appreciated and I'm really pleased to see my blogs becoming populated.


A bit later...

Okay, I've been away and had a nosey at other blogs. Most useful so far have been

Ward-O-Matic

,

Cafe Mama

and

Cadence90

I would have put a comment up on Ward's site, but I was asked for a password so I guess there's some sort of 'members only' thing going on there ? All people are welcome to comment at my various blogs, but I will always delete blatant advertising and may censor foul language if it's used in a way that's unwarranted or else remove the comment entirely. I don't like swearing, and I will be applying the 'Living Room Principal' mentioned at Cadence90, which I feel is very appropriate.

Who do you write for ?

I've been reading about the therapeutic benefits of keeping a diary today, and I know a lot of bloggers use their blogs for this purpose. My query is who the target audience for such blogs and paper-based journals might be ? Do you write for yourself ? Do you write with a specific set of readers in mind ? Who ? Does it affect your writing style ?

My 'voice' is a little different on each of my blogs, which is one of the reasons for separating things out in the first place. This particular blog, which I consider the 'root' blog, is here to try and elicit responses from people on topics of interest to me. I do use it diary my growing understanding of the use and abuse of blogs as well, though - hence the 'Experiencing the Blog' thread.

I've kept diaries in the past, for various reasons and for varying lengths of time (usually it's a fad and goes away again after a little while). I don't want to expose my soul to the world in general, so my blogs aren't diairies, with the possible exception of 'Bullied At Work'. The reason that one is different is because in the back of my mind is the thought that I might one day a) use it as some kind of evidence of what happened to me b) might encourage other people to talk more about bullying too.

So I ask again, who are you writing for ?

What we expect is what we get

I just read an article in "Psychologies" (Sept 2006) about how some people hoaxed their way into mental institutions in 1972 by faking symptoms of schizophrenia. The article's author, Claudia Hammond, makes this observation:

"What fascinates me... is that once a patient was diagnosed with schizophrenia, anything they did was taken as confirmation that this was true...once we have a view of what somenoe's like, we look for anything that backs our ideas and explain away any evidence to the contrary."

I think that's quite an astute observation.