Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Blogging Advice



Jane Hamsher includes some in a recent post:

...you have to post regularly about the topics that news junkies are interested in and you have to find a way to write your issues into those. It is difficult to get people to care about pro-choice, my personal signature issue. I found a way to write it into the Alito story, the Joe Lieberman story, the NARAL story, in a way that the blogosphere got interested in because I took the time to figure out how things worked and how you could catch the wave. I also took a lot of time building relationships with other bloggers, reading what they had to say, linking back to them, going out of my way to meet them in person when I could (no matter how big or little the blog) and being in conversation with other bloggers rather than sitting there carping about how they never linked to me.

I thought about this a lot last night while brushing my fangs the required five minutes. Then I thought about it some more. The advice she gives is quite good, but I have not taken it. So I went through all those rounds in the spiral of thinking, from feeling annoyed at myself for not doing all those things that well, to feeling annoyed that such marketing acts (as I see them) are required to sell certain topics (often feminist ones) to a wider audience (consisting of what type of people?), then veering back into asking what all this means for the definition of blogging as an enterprise (a commercial one?) as compared to simple acts of writing or communication, and finally deciding that I will never arrive at some ice-clear conclusion on any of this. Better just write it all down.

So I did.