When I was attending the KidLitCon in Minneapolis a couple months back (ahhh–how is it already that late into December?), we saw Maggie Stiefvater for our keynote speaker. Maggie gave us eight points about blogging that I thought were amusing.
1. The world does not need another blog
- She’s right of course. There are tons and tons of defunct blogs. There are blogs started all the time and only a few turn into the Librarian in Black, Pioneer Woman, or the Yarn Harlot. But as long as one doesn’t have those kind of aspirations, there are still good reasons to start them.
2. Boring people offline = Boring people online. And sometimes, interesting people offline = Boring people online.
- Yup. This. I hit bored to tears with myself last night on Hedgehog Knitting. I dumped four planned posts because I was sick of the subject matter, did an abbreviated “ooh shiny” post and moved on…
3. Blogging is a conversation.
- Blogging began as a form of online diary and many of us do still use it in that respect. But there’s also an anticipated dialogue. I expect readers to bring something to the blog; I hope they’ll leave comments or send me an email or leave me a note on Friendfeed;
4. People will learn your cat’s name.
- Well, of course. But she just had a birthday and having her is like having a roommate…
5. People make a connection with you.
- I hope so!
6. People can find out everything about you.
- Ah yes, what comes up when you run the search engines on yourself. There’s a lot that’s easy to find about me and a fair amount that isn’t but is accessible if you know how to go digging.
7. Blog readers are real people.
- Occasionally, this surprises me. While I do have friends who I know actively read, there are times that people say “ah yes, I saw that on the blog” and I’m blown away. You did? You mean, you read that? People paying attention is, for some reason, a surprise.
8. Blog writers should be blog readers.
- I started reading blogs long before I started writing one and I still read far more than I ever aspire to write. There are library blogs, news feeds, knitting blogs, friends blogs, all sorts of things. And while occasionally overwhelming, it keeps me up to speed. Most of the time…
What are your blogging points?
Hedgehog Librarian 
I started blogging mostly because if you’ve done system administration you will be pleasantly surprised by how we humans are creatures of habit. I always thought blogs evolved from this. It was the ability to chronicle the inane things you did in the hopes that at a future date you could “hack yourself”.
In this vein I started blogging (and continue to but to a smaller degree) with the hopes that I would learn something about myself. I realized how Quixotian this task would be and gave that up altogether. Sometimes “absurd” or “no answer” _is_ the answer.
In any event HI!
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I’ll believe that! Having built several databases, I’m constantly stealing from myself before–old SQL code that I’ve tweaked to pieces and finally gotten to work. I don’t always know why–but it’s nice to be able to at least go and grab what I did before. 🙂 Cheers
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