It really is all about the “voices”….
via <Blog News for Bloggers>
Trudy Schuett writes on writeronline about “Why Writers Hate Blogs and How We Can Allay Their Fears”.
Some excerpts:
When blogs began to enter the mainstream over the last year, I could see writers viewing them with suspicion, and in some cases, outright hostility. That’s understandable. The “personal journal” kinds of blogs were, and still are in many cases, not very well-written and of marginal interest to the general public. There are other kinds of blogs, though. To name a couple, both news blogs and business blogs are often professionally-written and have established, and growing, circulation in multiple thousands of readers.
Still, a lot of writers are looking at blogs as just another thing to waste time and money on, or even as something they’d rather not know about at all.
Hmmmmm. They may be missing out on a whole lot of content that could help their writing or at the very least get a feel for what the public is writing about. I like to think that all types of writing will emerge from blogging and we have yet to know what the full impact will be. A part of me balks at comparing this type with another. Can’t we co-exist and realize the importance of all these “emerging voices”?
The other day, I did an (extremely) unscientific survey of 300 AZ tech-oriented people, who are also marketers, pub-licists, or otherwise firmly established in other professions as well. I asked what they thought about blogs in general and got respon-ses ranging from …blogs are only good for marketing purposes if you want to have a folksy, personal approach…to the electronic equivalent of the blank stare.
Even though the number is growing, we still get blank stares from the majority of educators, too.
Diaries and Journals
Blogs have been around a lot longer than you think. Dave Winer introduced Radio Userland in 1997, and they went into more-common use around 1999, when Pitas launched the first free weblogging tool.
What happened then was the blogosphere was flooded with daily diaries and personal journals, which led to the common mis-perception that a blog is ¡∫by definition¡Ö one of those things. A blog is only a content delivery technology, nothing more. What the content consists of is entirely up to the individual or business that owns it. People tend to think a blog must be of a personal nature because so many of them are, but the number of blogs that aren¡Ùt personal, and used for business, news, teaching purposes or other applications is growing every day.
I don’t really agree that “A blog is only a content delivery technology, nothing more.” That definition seems limiting. Wonder how long it will take for educational blogs to be recognized? It seems like we’re still an afterthought or a sideline mention in most of the articles written.
The Changes are a-coming
It is now (finally!) true that anyone can publish on their own website. Free bloghosts, with user-friendly interfaces now allow anyone who can use a word processor and navigate the Internet to set up their own blog. Once you understand that a blog is not the same thing as a traditional, static, website, that you can expect the blog will reach out to the world for you, as you expected your website to do (and were disappointed to find it didn¡Ùt) you can begin to understand why it is that I am so excited about blogging.
There’s another window of opportunity here, for those who have that deep need for the public to see their work and read their books. I won¡Ùt kid you ¡Ì yes, it does take some work, but not nearly as much as a static website. You won¡Ùt need to pay anyone to set up anything for you, and you will have full control of what goes in the blog, and when. You can change your content or almost anything else every five minutes if you want to.
How about focusing on another window of opportunity that centers on education? The opportunity to open new doors of communication and sharing among educators all over. The opportunity that could be afforded to students to see how they could have a voice that could make a difference. It really is all about the “voices”.
NEX TIME: Blogging School is in Session!
I’d like to think that Part 2 would be about schools but I suspect that it may be a “how-to” on learning about setting up and having a blog. What do you think?
I really enjoy reading any and every article about blogs that I can get my hands on. Trudy Schuett’s article made me think about a lot of things. I thank her for that.
—–