How to Dissect A Blog Completely

Over at AdamNation.org there is an interesting post on, well, posting to blogs. What those posts consist of, what they relate to, and how the ?A List? bloggers write. It seems that nowadays blogs are not just Web Journals Of Your Existence. No, they have morphed into Social Media.

Mmm, just rolls off the tongue doesn?t it? You?d think with a term like social media (I can just see Dan Gillmor loving the hell out of that term as we speak), that blogs would be a bit more in-depth than ?Hey, Joe Blow says this is the new trend. Check it.? And so on, and so forth.

Doesn?t anyone just write anymore? What is content on a blog like Scoble, anyway? Is it the words he surrounds his links with, or is it the links themselves? Or rather, is it the conversations they create? What?s really sad is that I think of the old dissection joke when I think about blogs. Let me phrase it correctly:

Analyzing blogs is like dissecting a frog. No one finds it very interesting and the frog dies in the process.

You can substitute blogs for just about anything that isn?t amazingly prevalent in your life, so I?ll stop with the dissection for both of our sakes. What I will say is why I write the way I do, and what I hope to accomplish with it.

I think that if you write, you should write for a reason. And that reason is simple, of course: You write for you.

Wow, what a bunch of bullshit, right? You were expecting something deep and thoughtful? ?Write for me, yeah, thanks Evan,? *Close Browser Window*

Well, it?s a bit more than that. Allow me to continue:

I write because I love to write. I don?t look forward to it. I don?t salivate in anticipation, but I do it because the words are in me and they must get out. As William Goldman, writer of The Princess Bride once said, the easiest thing in the world to do is not write. Writing is like a muscle: The more you use it, the stronger you get at it. Needless to say, after pumping out a weekly column for over a year now, not to mention years worth of blog posts, I can ramble on just about any subject if you give me enough time, space, and freedom.

But what does it all mean? What do I hope to accomplish? Well, for one, I like to showcase my work. A blog is pretty good at that. Whether you can write good posts, or whether you can write at all, if you do anything online that you?d like to highlight beyond your own site, blogs fill that void. They also let others in on what?s going on in your personal life, if you so choose (hence my Family Matters posts).

They also, in the end, give you a record of your existence. Who wants to be forgotten? Who doesn?t love to read old diaries/journals, particularly of themselves? I once found an old diary-ish notebook from around 6th grade. You want to laugh your ass off, give that a whirl. It?s fascinating to see how you change in the long term, and it always will be.

While I see blogs as a tool for all sorts of endeavors, including marketing, promotion, and networking, I also see them as they were originally meant to be: Journals of your activities and interests. How you choose to display those is your choice. I like to tie my posts to a theme and try to write them in a thoughtful way. The way you tie words together tells a lot about yourself, so short posters are a-okay in my book too. Sometimes you?d rather let your links do the talking. Not that there?s anything wrong with that.

That last line is very important. Not only did it make the ?Gay? episode of Seinfeld work, it also explains any blog in existence. Do I enjoy the vast number of livejournals and their navel gazing? Nah. But not that there?s anything wrong with that. If you get out of it what you put into, and hopefully moreso, then that?s mission accomplished. And in the end, if your blog is read by at least one more person than yourself, then I consider that success.

So with that, may you be successful in your blogging.

I?m not here
This isn?t happening

Tags: AdamNation blogging Social Media Dan Gillmor Scoble dissecting Princess Bride Goldman Writing