Much discussion goes around these days about blogs and whether they are a good thing or not. One of the biggest reasons of criticism is the fact that many people create a blog without having anything important to write about, and then they do everything to have visits and hope those visits click on their stupid ads (web ads died a long time ago, didn’t you know ?).
Ok, so that’s probably bad, but isn’t that happened since the dawn of websites and ads ? It’s still the same thing, it’s just probably a bit easier to do now. But that doesn’t means blogs are by all means a bad thing. Like in every new technology or trend, you have to weigh in the pros and the cons, and in the end you’ll decide whether it’s good or not. And we’ll probably have different opinions about it anyway because…well, we’re human right ?
So my take on blogs is, give it a try. Even if you think you don’t have anything to write about, give it a try. Ok, so you’ll probably end up realizing you don’t have anything to write about and you’ll end up being another “ex-blogger“, but at least you tried, and if things come out well you’ll probably realize you have something to write about, something that people actually care about and you didn’t even knew it.
You don’t have to write about your personal life. Nobody cares about how you went to the club and got drunk and met this girl and blah, blah. Tell that to your friends, not to your blog readers (who might or might not be the same persons). Write about something interesting. Your professional area, if you really like what you do, a hobby, whatever. Write about how you learn new things, and you’ll probably be teaching other persons some new things as well, things they should probably have learned a long time ago, but by some mishappen they missed, or you’ll be helping them learn more about something else, who knows. Write about your opinions on some subject (like i’m doing right now), and people will probably argue with you about it. Luckily, you won’t end up in a flame fest and have a nice argument about some subject and probably even learn more about it. It’s all about learning more people !
And you don’t have to blog every day, every week, just because you want to keep active. Blog when you have something interesting to say, don’t blog just because you want people to remember you exist. Don’t be an attention whore. Many blog writers might disagree with me on this, but it’s my opinion and i’m sticking with it. And why ?
RSS feeds. You don’t have to be worried that people stop visiting your blog if they use RSS feeds, because on that case, your posts will go to them, you don’t have to wait for your readers to come to you. What about that majority of web users who haven’t ever heard about RSS feeds (or have, but just thought “oh that’s too difficult for me to learn” or “oh that’s probably some feature useless for me”) ? Educate them. Teach them what RSS feeds are, tell them about a RSS feed reader, how it works, and how to use it. It’s not that difficult.
Me for example. I use Firefox 2 and Bloglines. Just setup Firefox to subscribe your feeds to Bloglines, create a Bloglines account and you’re set. You just have to click the RSS feed icon on Firefox and it’ll open up the subscription page on Bloglines. Is it that hard ? If everyone can learn how to use hi5 or myspace, they surely can learn how to use Bloglines. So educate your friends, or possible readers for your blog. They’ll learn how to use RSS feeds, they’ll probably subscribe other RSS feeds for other blogs and news sites, and they’ll end up having a look at their feed readers every day and get used to it. It’s not rocket science ! It’s not a transition from Windows to Linux ! It’s free and easy.
