I have a blog. I update it fairly sporadically and nobody, to my knowledge, reads it. On one hand I’m not sure if I want them to. I might feel pressured to write to an audience, and I couldn’t write anything too personal, or stuff that was other people’s business, etc. On the other hand, the fact that it’s in a public space makes me ‘censor’ myself to begin with, so I don’t write anything overly personal or gossipy at the moment anyway. I feel like I’m stuck in an awkward in between space, the trappings of a diary gone public without the benefit of interaction with readers.
Tell me, bloggers, how have you made this hobby work for you? Do you write about a specific topic (politics, cooking etc) or just muse about your daily life? Do people read your blog? Do people you *know * read your blog? Do you ever write about people that you know on your blog?
Obviously I don’t *have *to have a blog. I’ve just always been a bit of a diary-keeper, and part of the appeal of doing it the internet way is the potential for interaction - it seems to give point to the endeavor. It’s probably only people I know personally who would probably want to read my blah blah (and even then I don’t know, its pretty boring!) but it seems somehow weird for them to do so. Is it? I don’t know.
I’m interested in how other bloggers navigate the matter of privacy - there seems to be a million little lines, and each person has to choose which ones to cross. Posting real names of people? Pictures of yourself? Pictures of your kids? Referring to your city, your workplace? Mentioning your spouse, your sex life?
Apologies for the somewhat rambling and open-ended questions. Doper bloggers, tell me how you do it!
You can set the blog to be private or password protected , so that the main page is visible, to get to any of the entries you have to enter the password.
I like to write about whats on my mind at any given time , rant if nessecary or do app reviews for the iphone. Specifically about people not so much, the phrase ignorance of the law is no defense comes to mind, but if they are public figures and news worthy events covered by other types of media then I dont find a problem writing my own spin.
Not weird, you may have a different take on something or articulate it better, if they dont like it , they will move on.
IF it on the internet, chances are its there forever. Avoid writing about individuals and keep what you think is private , private. Internet law is still in its infancy and your company may have internet policies that you might end up violating. Freedom of speech is govt specific and not universal, you mention your company and you could get fired.
That said , there are millions of bloggers out there, I dont think you will do something that has not been done before.
I comment on a lot of different blogs that are similar to mine in order to get people aware of my blogs. Also, when I first started out, I emailed a couple of bloggers who had extensive blogrolls with blogs similar to mine and asked them to put mine on them. I get a pretty good following (42 official followers, usually about 10 to 15 comments per post). Not sure how many hits it gets because the site I signed up for to track that is super wonky, but it seems like quite a few people do.