Blogging and life – continued

Writing a weblog is a continuing adventure. If you write with honesty and passion, you have the chance to make a contribution to the blogosphere. Your adventures and mishaps enable others to recreate your successes and avoid your failures. This holds true whether you write for the love of it or write to promote and support yourself.

Writing for the sheer adventure of letting your thoughts fly across the internet can be an exhilarating experience. You write, people in far places respond, and happiness occurs! That suggests that you are writing things that others want to read.

Sometimes you write carefully crafted articles after days of research and nobody responds. That may be an indicator that you are boring your audience or overwhelming them in some way. Life is simpler when you are honest, but you might consider withholding those thoughts that will confuse, upset and offend others.

It takes a lot of research and study to attain and appreciate wisdom. Just because you have attained enlightenment, don’t expect that others will share your understanding.  When you try to share your findings with others, don’t be surprised if they attack you for heresy.

Heresy is in the eye of the beholder and a fearful society sees heresy in everything that destroys a comforting belief or threatens the status quo.

In today’s world, you can barely get away with demythifying the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. If you try to discuss the actions of political and religious groups, you can expect to be severely attacked even if you have your facts right.

If you use your blog to discuss the shortcomings of your boss, your company, or your significant others, you had best do it from a position of complete anonymity or you will undergo sudden and severe changes in these relationships.

If you are writing a blog for commercial gain, take care to avoid pointless flackery. This may take some doing as you may have been trained to perform relentless outflow to an uncaring audience. The blogosphere does not follow mass media rules because blogging is a conversation. When your blog is nothing more than a series of canned commercial messages, readers will not only tune you out, they will warn others not to visit your site.

Business-oriented blogs as diverse as Hugh McLeod’s gapingvoid  and Paul Woodhouse’s Tinbasher’s Blog manage to entertain while delivering a commercial message. There are more entertaining business and political blogs every day. You do not need an MBA to see that the business proposition which created 20th century newspaper empires is faltering.

The future is not clear, but conversations about products, candidates, and current events can be carried out through blogs with an ease and honesty that cannot be matched by any other media.

When blogs start featuring music and movies, we may see a new paradigm for celebrity self-promotion. Bruce Willis has a series of linked sites that hint at what can be done. The key factor is that it is not all about him. He has even used his site to promote the independent and informed observer Michael Yon, who is still chronicling events in Iraq.

There is still time to get started blogging and an almost infinite audience waiting to hear from you.  Don’t worry about being "good" enough to blog. If you keep on writing from the heart, you will eventually get it right.

Wishing you success.