Sunday Collection: Blogging

Mostly this business of blogging is invisible. It’s the vehicle through which we talk to each other. This week I’ve collected a few posts about the vehicle itself.

Tamarika at Mining Nuggets shared the following quote from Citizen of the Month – I think it’s fantastic:

The fascinating part of [blogging] is that I can write about my talking Penis and have some guy in Iran read my blog, and soon his Penis wants to talk, too! And then, his wife, hearing the sound of love, wants to overthrow the government! And because of one blog post, the whole world is filled with freedom and love and happiness! Now that’s inspiring. I’m all for your personal blog being all about you. That’s how I view my blog. But blogging is more than your own blog. It is the thrill of the freedom of expression, and the random and unlikely connections that we make with each other. And who can forget the importance of comments? Comments alone can MAKE a post interesting.

And Tamarika herself has some interesting things to say here about blogging and self-expression.

There are a lot of blogs that talk about how to be a better blogger. Often, “better” means making money from blogging. (Nothing wrong with that, I’ve thought of “monetising” my own blog before now.) But often money becomes the focus, not the content. That’s why I always read Skelliewag. She has real, sensible, high quality advice about blogging. Here’s a sample from her post Are you Blogging Consciously:

We can get so caught up in being productive that we don’t take the time to evaluate whether the task we want to hone down to a fine art is actually worth doing!

Adapting this idea, it’s also worth considering whether you’re blogging consciously. Are you so caught up in doing everything, all the time, that you’ve forgotten to ask whether something is really worth doing?

If you feel like you might be blogging on autopilot, here are some important questions to ask yourself.

You’ll have to click through to the post to find out what her questions are. I think number 6 is the most important.

One of my never-miss bloggers is Leo Babuta at Zen Habits, and I was really excited for him when he announced this week that ZH is now so successful he is able to resign his day job and become a full time blogger. He says:

Blogging on Zen Habits was then, and still is, so much fun that I couldn’t believe it could actually become a full-time thing. But it became a dream of mine, and I thought: maybe by this time next year, I could quite my day job!

So I created a mantra for myself. It was one word: Liberate.

This mantra was repeated every day. Everything I did was geared toward that mantra — blogging became a way to liberate myself. New projects were steps along that path. And it has been an exciting and rewarding path at that.

Sue at Discombobula, a blog I’ve only quite recently found, has an interesting piece about blogging called Claustrophobia. She’d initially published the post then deleted it. She says:

I put this post back up because I realised I was trying to sanitise myself, and I’m not interested in doing that anymore. The good thing about getting older and gaining in self-love is that you become much less concerned about what people think about you.

Cheering you on, Sue!

There are two blogs about blogging that I’m not going to quote from here, but that you might find useful. You may well already know them:

• Lorelle on Wordpress. Clearly from the title, this will only be of interest to those of you using Wordpress.
• ProBlogger. This is aimed primarily at those wanting to make a living from blogging, but Darren has loads of useful advice for all bloggers. I say loads deliberately – if his blog has one fault it is that he posts so often, I for one cannot keep up with him.
  If you happen to be reading this and are new to blogging, or thinking about starting a blog, you’ll find his Beginners series enormously helpful.

I’m going to end by recycling a Mark Twain quote Leo used:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Have a blessed week everyone.

Image above by Mike Licht

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