Ultimately, I don’t expect people to read my blog exclusively but when I run into anything that I feel others should know about I post it as soon as I can. Seth Godin posted an outrageously large list of tips on how to get traffic to your blog. I can’t say I follow all of those, but then again the purpose of this blog really isn’t to obtain a whole lot of traffic, whereas at work, the purpose of blogging is quite different. But I am at a point where I wonder why I keep blogging…?
I can’t see it … do you?
Trying to encourage people to blog in the workplace is difficult. People have a lot of work to do, myself included. How did this topic come up? Well, lately I’ve been trying to encourage my fellow co-workers to blog — about anything related to what they do! However I think after blogging on and off late last year and then consistently blogging since January 2007, I can understand the obstacles. What are some of the key stumbling blocks? Well the questions that I have heard and consistently are the following:
- What do I blog about?
- What should I say?
- How should I say it?
- Is what I’m writing OK?
- Would anyone even bother reading this?
I began to ask myself why I blog …
I think I blog because I enjoy sharing thoughts and bouncing ideas off of other people. In fact, when I am in need of ideas I tend to walk around the office throwing ideas at people and seeing what they think. Especially as a web worker (aka. web slave) it’s always important to determine what others think. With a blog however, we are sharing ideas with people we do not really know and are not even aware of — that is until they write a comment.
For me, the Internet had changed how we interact with one another back in 1995 when I first got my dial-up access and discovered the richness that was the World Wide Web and IRC (Internet Relay Chat). To be able to say hi to someone on the other side of the world and have them respond back in real time blew my mind away, I was hooked. Fast forward 12 years, post-secondary education complete and working full time … I still look at those first days of the Internet as having one of the biggest impact of my life. I remember running to my friends at school and telling them about it and having everyone give me odd looks as I explained to them how I had the opportunity to speak to someone on the other side of the world. What we had then was the freedom and ability to roam from #channel to #channel and meet random people to share common interests, ideas and thoughts.
Web 2.0 is really an extension of this ideal. We blog, we chat, we share bookmarks, websites, photographs, videos, music and much more over the World Wide Web. However now that so many people are involved and technology has made it so much easier to become aware of the presence of another person, I can’t help but wonder if it truly brings people from across the world together or if these newer technologies merely encourages us to share amongst friends in real life and family only.
0 Responses to “Why do I blog?”
Leave a Reply