blogging

I came across two links that I thought were worth sharing. The first is a blog post by Dave Winer and it’s called How Hollywood portrays bloggers. In it he says, “A blogger isn’t just someone who uses blogging software, at least not to me.” I agree and this is one of the misperceptions about blogging that comes up again and again with those who really don’t know much about blogging. How the software is used and why it’s used as it is — that’s what defines a blogger.

The how’s and why’s, by the way, are many.

The other link I wanted to share was to this story: A Portuguese success story: could i be the future of newspapers? (Found via @jayrosen_nyu) I thought it was a fascinating approach and hope the paper succeeds. Its early success suggests that newspapers are not dead, as we often hear, but in transition. As with my blogging comment where I argue too many confuse the software with the way it is used, too many people see the problems newspapers are experiencing as residing in the mode rather than the use.

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(This was originally posted October 23rd, 2005 on another one of my blogs, one that is on hiatus. I’ve edited slightly to make the terminology more current.)

I came across a post about blogging and social media and know exactly what it’s talking about when the blogger asks, “Why do some write about every, little, single, humdrum, minute aspect of the everyday?” It can be annoying and irksome at the best of times. I feel like she does. On the other hand, I do the very thing that bugs me.

It got me thinking about blogging again and, surprisingly, I came across a song by Emmylou Harris that I think of now as the social media song. It’s called Can You Hear Me Now?

And I’m reminded of two quotes. The first is Eduardo Galeano in his Book of Embraces. I’ve lost the exact wording, but it was along the lines of, “Everyone has a voice, something to say that needs to be heard by the others.” (I’ve pretty much butchered it, but that’s roughly what he said.)

The other quote is possibly from Martin Luther King, though I may be wrong. But it goes something like, “Violence is the speech of those who have no voice.”

And my point with both of these is the business of a voice. Technology aside, social media and most things on the Internet are about communication and communication is about people and voices and having someone on this silly rock just listen to you.

I send out my S.O.S.
A message in a bottle set out to sea
It just reads “Soul in distress”
And nobody ever got back to me

Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?

Not that everyone online is in distress. Most aren’t. But the point is people need to chatter and they need to feel someone, anyone, is listening to them chatter. I’ve always thought this was one of the biggest mistakes people make in relationships – not understanding that part of your job when you’re in one is to be a sounding board.

And sometimes not understanding that you really only need to appear to be listening because, often, when people sound off they don’t necessarily want a discussion. Shit builds up during the day and they need to let it go, like steam. Part of the art of listening is knowing when you’re supposed to listen and interact and when you’re really just supposed to sit there and nod.

I guess my point is that people need an outlet and this is one of the things social media provides – outlets. But people also need a sense that there is someone listening, even if what they are saying is nothing worth saying. The act of communication is often more important than the content of the communication. And this is why we see things online like – I changed my pants, I brushed my teeth, I petted the dog and so on.

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

People are looking for an ear.

Not long ago, I came across one of the saddest blogs I’ve encountered. It was from a year or two ago, a woman in Toronto, and it was a blog with single post. Her husband of a certain number of years had been having an affair she had been unaware of. Now he had left saying he not only didn’t love her, he never had and now he had finally found someone he did love. She was blind-sided and alone and … well, you know the story.

One post. Who do you talk to when the house is empty, you’re alone and this is what you’re dealing with?

How did the load get to be so heavy?
I used to wear my trouble like a crown
A bad flood’s pounding on the levee
And I’m gonna need some help to hold my ground.

Anyway … blogs aren’t all sad – the exact opposite. I read a lot of blogs because they’re so damn funny.

But I think I mainly read them because I find people who feel about things the way I do – and sometimes very trivial things. But you get a sense that you’re not alone. You realize how freakin’ big the world is, how many people are out there, and that someone, somewhere is listening.

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

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For me, the key to blogging is simply this: you have to like writing. You need to be the sort of person who would be writing what you blog whether blogs existed or not. A blog, for me, is simply a place to put what I write with the added advantage of thinking of it as “published,” even if for all practical purposes few, if any, people will actually see and read it. Put another way, a blog is not an end, though it has the illusion of being that. The writing is the end.

I don’t know when I started blogging. I have no remembered date so I can’t really do anniversary posts. Even if I did have the date I started I wouldn’t do anniversary posts simply because I would never remember to do them. According to my archives, my first post here, on Writelife, was May 16, 2004. It’s a boring post, that first one, a redirect of sorts and refers vaguely to my interest in movies. Yawn.

Writelife was not my first blog. My first, and still alive and well blog, was Piddleville. Today it’s about movies, that interest I alluded to in my first Writelife post. Here’s the thing: according to the Piddleville archives my first post was in December, 2001 – and it’s actually pretty funny. You’ll notice that it is on Blogger and is called The Burble. That was an earlier manifestation of my blogging. My blogging from the past is quite a muddle because I was trying new things – blogs, types of blogs, domains and so on, learning as I went along. I’m more coherent now, though still a bit muddled.

Here’s how all my muddle came about: the truth is, I was blogging before there were blogs. Those posts, however, are not archived on any blog, largely because there were no blogs around when they were created. So when they were written and put online is unknown.

Back then, I would write something, turn it into a page with very basic HTML coding and upload it to my site, which was Piddleville (piddleville.com). The site was a site, not a blog (as we think of them now), and it was a pretty basic site – a good deal of text, some images and simple HTML.

When blogs came about, or at least when Blogger came about and gained some traction, I kept my site but began using Blogger for posts. And I think I linked them back and forth. (Things began to get muddled around this time.)

It doesn’t really matter. The point is simply that I don’t know when I started blogging, in the sense that I think of blogging. Blogging, as I define it, is simply writing something and putting it online. To be more specific, you could say “putting it online using self-publishing tools.” Or something like that. But to me the writing is the important part of the definition, not the tool.

One day, I should really go over my own online history. It would certainly be of interest to me. For one thing, Piddleville has had a number of manifestations over the years. I feel a bit sentimental about the first one, the original Piddleville. It was not a site or blog as we think of them today.

It was fiction. It was a kind of local news site for a town (Piddleville) that existed only in my head. And if I may be a little self-inflated, it was damned funny! There was a very proper, schoolmarm like character named Henta McKlosky who was running for town council. And there was a somewhat sleazy, Rodney Dangerfield like guy named Dick Whizzy – “The Whizzer!” He was running for the same spot on town council. Henta wanted to advance the interests of public schools in Piddleville; Dick wanted to play fast-and-loose with funding to pay for a brothel he wanted to open, the Havana Hubba-Hubba Hotel.

There was Barclay, the self-important movie and social critic. And there was Billy Smalls, a little kid who seemed to live only for getting into trouble by creating embarrassing situations for people in the town. And on and on. Believe me, I had fun doing it.

Eventually it evolved and had various other manifestations until I reached a point where the unfocused nature of what I was doing online was getting out of hand. So Piddleville became my blog/site for my interest in movies and I created Writelife for my interest in writing, technology, social media and so on. I imposed some focus.

All the above tangent is really just to reinforce what I wrote initially – you need to be the sort of person who would be writing what you blog whether blogs existed or not.

So I blog because I write. It doesn’t work the other way around, at least not for me.

(This post was prompted after reading Mark Dykeman’s post, Things I’ve learned after two years of blogging.)

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People are like art in a number of ways. I’m currently thinking of one way in particular. (Please forgive the pseudo-egghead moment and indulge me.) A work of art exists in three states simultaneously.

• What the artist perceives it to be
• What it objectively is
• What people other than the artist perceive it to be

That’s also how people exist. There is what we think we are, there is what we are objectively and there is what others perceive us to be. The second, whether it be a work of art or a person, that objective existence, is more or less irrelevant practically speaking since no one can ever truly see something (or someone) objectively. It’s always conditioned by who we are and where we view something from.

When we start talking about personal brands, we are primarily talking about the third state: how others perceive us. But when we use the term brand, especially in this sense, we’re really talking about who we are, our identity. When we concentrate on, and try to develop, a “personal brand” what we are really doing is trying to fashion who others perceive us to be. As Kurt Vonnegut has said, “We are what we pretend to be.” He adds, given that, you better be careful about what you pretend you are.*

I prefer not to talk about a personal brand because the term is divorced from any human quality. It’s like seeing yourself as a product, which some people think is fine and that’s fine for them, I guess. But I’d rather think of my “identity,” though even that may not be the best terminology. (I would say “human being” but when I do I sense the earnestness of the original Star Trek and Doctor McCoy’s, “But dammit, Jim, we’re human!”)

It’s a bit odd that we talk about ourselves as brands when, at the same time, we also talk about conversations, a personal voice and community. Those are all very human but “brand” is a box of soap. I know some will disagree but that’s how I see it and I don’t want to be a soap, a cereal, a line of cars. I want to be a human being. I want to be who I am, for good or ill.

That’s why there are posts in my blogs that, were I thinking in terms of a personal brand, I would not have published or, having published, would have deleted them.  (Example? See my silly post, Forget newspapers – everything is dead!) But it’s who I am, even if that’s an idiot. I don’t think I’ve ever posted anything salacious or rude (like pictures of a frat party or something) and I think I’ve avoided ever mentioning employers I’ve had, though I certainly would have liked to rant every now and again.

There is thinking that says you need to be careful of what you post in a blog and usually extreme examples are given. A potential employer could Google you and find out who you really are. Well, if you’re posting nude pictures of yourself or others, or using constant profanity, or ranting against current employers, the world’s better off not hiring you anyway. Keep posting.

In my case I’ve posted some self-indulgent rants – maybe about music, or a film, a story in the news or an election. But I don’t mind that a potential employer sees them because, if the employer is worth working for, they’ve also seen my other posts and will see that I’ve a passion for what I do and, as with any passionate human being, sometimes I write something moronic. I’m a human being.

Would you really want to work for an employer who is only looking for a perfect automaton? Someone who has a “brand” but no personal identity? A cog to fit in their wheel?

The best employers look for the best people and the best people have quirks, off the map moments, and a passion for what they do. You get ideas from people like that. From a personal brand, you get whatever rubbish maintains the status quo.

I’m not saying you should rant and rave in your blog. I’m just saying don’t hide who you are.

Don’t be a brand. Be a person.

* In Vonnegut’s book Mother Night an American spy, during World War II, pretends to be a Nazi, acting as a propagandist, spewing hate about Jews and others. But after the war, on trial for war crimes,  he realizes he was so good at pretending to be a Nazi that, for all intents and purposes, he was a Nazi.

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A friend of mine asks, Why should I blog? For me the quick and easy answer is because I like it. More specifically, I like writing. And if I look at everything I’ve posted on this blog and my other blog (Piddleville) I realize that what I’m really doing is thinking out loud online. I tend to work out ideas on my blogs.

I’m also playing and learning. Surely that’s a good reason to blog?

There are probably as many reasons to blog as there are bloggers. In recent years, however, the popularity of blogs has grown and, with that growth, blogs got noticed (the blogosphere!) and the inevitable commercial questions popped up: how to monetize this thing? How do I leverage this? What’s the marketing angle?

A lot of bloggers now think in terms of purpose. What should I be writing? Who should I be writing for? How should I be writing this?

And there are oodles of web sites out there providing tips on the how’s, the why’s and the what’s. If that’s what you want to do, that’s fine. But for me, it sounds very dreary. It sounds like work.

A few months back I wrote a brief post, Who are we writing for?, where I said, in my case, I write for myself. (I said a bit more than that, however.)

There is thinking, though, that says that’s all well and good but what about how it may affect how you’re perceived by potential employers and clients? This worry can lead to a kind of personal censorship. You may say what you think but, you may not because someone might get the wrong impression.

And what about purpose? Surely a blog should have one, the kind that will build an audience and lead to advertising revenue, maybe a book down the road – even speaking engagements!

Once again, that’s fine for some. But for me, thinking that way more or less leads to a creative drought. This may be partly because you can get caught up with statistics, like unique visitors, and schedules, such as, “I have to post something about this thing every Tuesday.”

Who knows? With all that “purpose” driving us, and with some success, we may find it makes more financial sense to get ghost-bloggers so we can spend our time more efficiently.

Or we may end up caught in a routine of dreary work that doesn’t succeed at all because, realistically, only a few blogs succeed in a commercial sense and there are gazillions that don’t. As I’ve said before, blogs and web sites are a lot like restaurants that way. Success is a bit of a crap shoot (no matter what the experts may tell you).

Why should you blog? You shouldn’t. Not unless you enjoy it. If you do like it then the question becomes, why should you not blog?

If you like music, why would you not sing? If you like movies, why would you not go to them? If you like tennis, why would you not play?

We often get so caught up in purpose – practical purpose – we forget to have fun.

That’s not something I’d want to forget.

(Note: This also relates to another post that I had in draft format but had forgotten about. I would have added it this post but it would have been way too long, so I hope to post “Art, people and personal brands” tomorrow.)

Update (March 2, 2010):

See “Why do you blog if not for money?” on Broadcasting Brain

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I have a great dislike for the knee-jerk cynic. I have one residing in me and it’s often a tussle keeping him bound and gagged. But sometimes I let him have his say if only because he makes interesting observations (though not always for the right reasons).

An aspect of the tsunami tragedy in South Asia, and the ongoing tragedy of its aftermath, struck me after seeing some of the media reporting of the disaster. It has me wondering if, despite the scope of human tragedy, it would receive the attention it is getting here in North America if celebrities were not involved, if it didn’t contain the spectacle of scale. Would we care as much?

Countless tragic events occur in the world but most don’t get the media play this one has.

If it’s true we have more interest in this tsunami disaster for these reasons then I think it should also be pointed out that it doesn’t mean we are a hopelessly self-absorbed people. (Though I do despair sometimes over our obsession with celebrity and scale.)

What it means is that even with an event as horrific as this we find it difficult to be anything more than instinctively and briefly shocked by the spectacle of its scope. Most of us require relatable, human touchstones within such an event in order to connect on a visceral level. (I think this is where organizations like World Vision succeed. They have child sponsorship programs and these connect people with a bit more immediacy, putting a face to people living in places and cultures so distant from us.)

Our brain, with its moral sense, may be jogged by seeing and reading about an event like this – on the other side of the world, to a seemingly faceless people living lives we usually have no awareness of – but in order to be emotionally engaged we need something we can identify with. And crass though it may seem, celebrities and white-skinned tourists in bathing suits and shorts provides this. Scope grabs our attention. Distance (geographical and cultural) creates a disconnect.

So while part of me may see reports of celebrities and tourists and have a knee-jerk cynical response to it, I also know tragedies like this one will soon pass from sight without doing anything more than raising an eyebrow if we don’t find ways to connect people to these events and relate to them somehow. Celebrity and spectacle may not be the best, most seemly way of doing this but it is effective, to some extent at least.

And if you’re inclined to make a donation to the relief efforts, please do. Here are a few places you may want to consider:

• Red Cross — Tsunami Disaster Relief (on Amazon.com)
• World Vision – Help Tsunami Victims

UPDATE: Some of what I made a poor attempt at articulating above is touched on in David Akin’s blog entry, Reporting the disaster of our lifetime. My take regarding celebrity and spectacle is not what he discusses; rather, he looks at blogging and journalism. But his example of an article in the NY Times is what I was getting at when I referred to connecting people to an event on a visceral level. (His is an example of an excellent story, one that doesn’t rely on endangered celebrities or shocking us with spectacle but instead deals with the enormity of the event by humanizing it through individuals and their experience.)

As for the issue of blogs and journalism that he speaks to, this isn’t an issue for me. I think a blog can be a vehicle for legitimate reporting, in the right hands. But for me, this isn’t what I look to blogs for. Blogs alert me to what is happening, interesting ideas and so on. I take the blogger’s perspective with a grain of salt (though there are some exceptions). This isn’t because I distrust the blogger. Rather, I prefer to get a variety of perspectives – the traditional media, blogs and so on and then draw my own conclusions.

I know there is a debate of sorts about blogs and journalism. It strikes me as a debate over form rather than content. Both can be excellent; both can be garbage. The vehicle is irrelevant.

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