Philosophy of Blogging
It took me a long time to convince myself getting a blog was a remotely good idea. Didn't think it would ever be pointful to write up the minutiae of my life. Who'd care, who'd read it? A truly writeup-worthy event, I felt, must come around only once a week at the max. Yawn.
A while ago I asked Doug why he blogged about (uninteresting) daily life, and he answered something like this: challenge yourself to MAKE daily life interesting. Find an unexpected point of view.
One nice thing about writing informally is that it encourages me to think about mundane things in depth, pull meta insights out of them, and write properly. On longer, more essay-like entries, I actually do an astonishing amount of editing (both at the sentence level and at higher levels). I think it has been, or will be, good for my writing. And that is a Good Thing.
I like having an informal soapbox to kick around random half-philosophical ideas. I find myself working on sort-of-essays for days ongoing, sometimes more (I've been working on a mental tract entitled "Where does the Soul of Music Lie?" for a couple years now, but it won't see daylight as a coherent whole for a looooooong time.)
Here's a random example: different styles of emphasis in writing. So far in this essay, I've used italics, caps, and letter repetition. I think they all have slightly different meanings. Plus, there are lots more - *emphasis like this* and *emphasis* *like* *this*, for example (from The New Hacker's Dictionary). I'm starting to think the ones you can do in a low-tech chat program (ie, not bold/italic/underline) have a more direct correspondence with emotion, evidentiality, tone of voice, etc...see? This is how my random musings develop.
I totally intended this to be a coherent whole, but that's just not happening, so one more thing and I'll stop. How frequently should you post? Some days you seriously don't feel like writing at all, so why bother posting something like "My brain has fallen out today...life was normal, nothing to report"? OTOH, you can wait too long for a masterful entry to come together, and you'll have lost half your readership. (Yes, I know that amounts to about one person in my case.) I try to take the middle road. Assuming nothing exceptional happens, I get likelier to put serious effort into writing an entry the longer I've left this journal unchanged. I don't stick to any kind of schedule, but I don't think this allows me to not post when an entry doesn't materialize by itself. How common is this approach I wonder?
A while ago I asked Doug why he blogged about (uninteresting) daily life, and he answered something like this: challenge yourself to MAKE daily life interesting. Find an unexpected point of view.
One nice thing about writing informally is that it encourages me to think about mundane things in depth, pull meta insights out of them, and write properly. On longer, more essay-like entries, I actually do an astonishing amount of editing (both at the sentence level and at higher levels). I think it has been, or will be, good for my writing. And that is a Good Thing.
I like having an informal soapbox to kick around random half-philosophical ideas. I find myself working on sort-of-essays for days ongoing, sometimes more (I've been working on a mental tract entitled "Where does the Soul of Music Lie?" for a couple years now, but it won't see daylight as a coherent whole for a looooooong time.)
Here's a random example: different styles of emphasis in writing. So far in this essay, I've used italics, caps, and letter repetition. I think they all have slightly different meanings. Plus, there are lots more - *emphasis like this* and *emphasis* *like* *this*, for example (from The New Hacker's Dictionary). I'm starting to think the ones you can do in a low-tech chat program (ie, not bold/italic/underline) have a more direct correspondence with emotion, evidentiality, tone of voice, etc...see? This is how my random musings develop.
I totally intended this to be a coherent whole, but that's just not happening, so one more thing and I'll stop. How frequently should you post? Some days you seriously don't feel like writing at all, so why bother posting something like "My brain has fallen out today...life was normal, nothing to report"? OTOH, you can wait too long for a masterful entry to come together, and you'll have lost half your readership. (Yes, I know that amounts to about one person in my case.) I try to take the middle road. Assuming nothing exceptional happens, I get likelier to put serious effort into writing an entry the longer I've left this journal unchanged. I don't stick to any kind of schedule, but I don't think this allows me to not post when an entry doesn't materialize by itself. How common is this approach I wonder?