Blogging

I started blogging to learn about the process. How to create and manage a blog and so on. I also thought it might be a good place to link up other stuff I have online and a place to store things like essays I've written for my university course. That was my only purpose in mind. I had no idea what I would be writing about as you can probably tell by the mish mash of posts that I have written.

Since December I've visited a good few other blogs and have been reading a number of sights dedicated to the actual blogging process. There is a part of me that thinks the "pro" blogging community takes itself just a little bit too seriously. It seems that the high end of the blogosphere (as I've come to learn it's called) is something of an internal loop - he said she said type of thing. Many of the "pro" blogs I've come across are in the main just passing comment on each others views and talking about the latest web / tech trend. I started out thinking that blogs were mostly personal though realise now I was a bit wrong about that. One thing I have discovered is how many companies now use blogs to promote what they are doing and engage with their customers. Not something I'm that interested in at all really.

True enough though there are millions of blogs of a personal nature. I've also been visiting a few of these. Ones that I go back to more often than not tend to fall into two camps. The first inhabited by blogs of people I have some connection with. Either I've come across them elsewhere online or people like my dad (who is now a regular blogger or my brother who is much less so (that last bit is an amazing turn of events and anyone that knows either of them will I am sure be just as surprised as I am by the fact). The second camp are blogs I learn from. These tend to be in relation to web stuff, my university course or just brain food to feed my easily distracted mind.

I've been reading "pro" bloggers advice about visual presentation and content. In a nutshell the message I got is to avoid adding clutter and the gimmicks, make things easy for your visitors and have a clear idea about your content. Common sense I suppose but then again "...there's nowt so rare". The second message was more in relation to generating traffic i.e. drawing people in.

In terms of presentation and the back end of the blog I am learning all the time and enjoying the process of discovery. In terms of the front end i.e. content I remain as unclear about that as when I started. For the time being I shall just keep writing about stuff that comes to mind.