Blogga blogga blogga!
Okay, so maybe I’m not Kurt Vonnegut, but that doesn’t mean I can’t spout off about whatever I want! I’ll spout and create a personality driven blog whether Ken Sands says I can or not!
Okay, that’s not true at all, and he makes a pretty decent point in his article It can be tough to train journalists how to be bloggers when he says that people can’t just get the web space and write whatever they want.
A quick stop by Movies and More at the Spokesman-Review site to see what a really well done blog looks like. It’s focused, it’s clear, it’s entertaining and it’s interesting.
I hope that I can provide just such a blog myself. For a moment, I wondered if my generation has an advantage over older writers because we’ve grown up with the Internet and evolved write along side technology.
Then I remembered Live Journal. This is where I believe the false notion that a blog can be about whatever is on your mind at the time came from.
Let me put a big disclaimer right here. In no way am I saying anything against the Live Journal community, or the use a blogs to relate personal and anecdotal information to mainly friends and loved ones. I keep up with a handful of friends through their blogs, and in fact the conversation therein has evolved to the point that I more often send notes through their postings than I do to their actual e-mail address.
However because these types of blogs really took off much faster than blogs put up by journalists for a specific purpose, somehow professional journalists thought they could just write about whatever, turning themselves into their own Dave Barry with millions of fans.
Unfortunately there’s already one Dave Barry, and if we’ve learned anything from blogs it’s that although you may be famous for 15 minutes through this medium, it may be only to 15 people.
No, Sands points out, and rightly so, that for a blog to succeed, it must have a point. That’s what brings people back to it each and every day.
I learned this with my first blog Discord/Harmony. What started out as random ranting over various issues quickly turned into a posting place for my radio show at KWVA, Eugene. As time went on I realized that there was no room on this blog for anything else. It had become what it had become. It’s introduced me to some great people, and opened up some new ideas and connections.
I may not have the spot to air out my personal feelings about the moron that cut me off on the freeway, but in a journalistic sense it’s quite fulfilling to have a task oriented and goal directed project to keep my neurons sharp.
Okay, that’s not true at all, and he makes a pretty decent point in his article It can be tough to train journalists how to be bloggers when he says that people can’t just get the web space and write whatever they want.
A quick stop by Movies and More at the Spokesman-Review site to see what a really well done blog looks like. It’s focused, it’s clear, it’s entertaining and it’s interesting.
I hope that I can provide just such a blog myself. For a moment, I wondered if my generation has an advantage over older writers because we’ve grown up with the Internet and evolved write along side technology.
Then I remembered Live Journal. This is where I believe the false notion that a blog can be about whatever is on your mind at the time came from.
Let me put a big disclaimer right here. In no way am I saying anything against the Live Journal community, or the use a blogs to relate personal and anecdotal information to mainly friends and loved ones. I keep up with a handful of friends through their blogs, and in fact the conversation therein has evolved to the point that I more often send notes through their postings than I do to their actual e-mail address.
However because these types of blogs really took off much faster than blogs put up by journalists for a specific purpose, somehow professional journalists thought they could just write about whatever, turning themselves into their own Dave Barry with millions of fans.
Unfortunately there’s already one Dave Barry, and if we’ve learned anything from blogs it’s that although you may be famous for 15 minutes through this medium, it may be only to 15 people.
No, Sands points out, and rightly so, that for a blog to succeed, it must have a point. That’s what brings people back to it each and every day.
I learned this with my first blog Discord/Harmony. What started out as random ranting over various issues quickly turned into a posting place for my radio show at KWVA, Eugene. As time went on I realized that there was no room on this blog for anything else. It had become what it had become. It’s introduced me to some great people, and opened up some new ideas and connections.
I may not have the spot to air out my personal feelings about the moron that cut me off on the freeway, but in a journalistic sense it’s quite fulfilling to have a task oriented and goal directed project to keep my neurons sharp.
posted by Aaron Burkhalter at
11:52 AM
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