Just another fish in the sea of blogs…
Eight years ago my definition of a blog was having a livejournal. I had one. I was a partially emo kid writing semi-angsty posts, letting my feelings seep into the Internet. Now, I still consider livejournal a blog just as much as any other blog, but blogging has so many more meanings. These days it seems like every business not only needs a regularly updated website, but a blog to go with it, and oh, don’t forget a twitter account so that all the busy people of the world can follow their favorite business in whilst going about their fast paced lives because heaven forbid all these new products be overlooked and forgotten.
And then there are the blogging competitions that generate even more free advertisement. Recently hundreds of thousands of people competed for the “Best Job In The World!”, a job feeding the fish and blogging about everything in the Great Barrier Islands so that Australia could generate more tourism in those islands (hope not too many hapless tourists go, wear harmful sunscreen, touch all the coral, and kill it). And I just found out today that there is now a contest to become a blogger on an expedition in Antarctica. The problem with some of these contests is the voting. It seems like whoever spends all their free time creating new email addresses or whoever has the most family and friends on Facebook will be the winner of those contests.
So after moving on from contests, we get to bloggers who make blogs their life. How someone creates an enormous following without a YouTube phenomenon is kind of a mystery to me. The first big blog I knew of was Pink Is The New Blog. My roommate in Tallahassee, Safia, would read it. It is all that good celebrity gossip without the newsstand price that a magazine holds…plus it is a little more vicious and biting (which equals more fun to read). Soon after I realized she read that blog, the author, Trent, was appearing on daily shows, going to premieres, and interacting with all kinds of not-everyday-kind-of-things.
Some people (probably Trent from Pink is the New Blog) are making their sole income off of a blog, from news related to science, to anything really. Recently my friend Joey Daoud, with his blog Coffee and Celluloid, was featured on ProBlogger.net with his blog promotion How I Got 12,000 Pageviews for $50. After reading that article I started to delve into the ProBlogger site. Whoa! Let’s just say I had no idea there was so much to know about blogs. I felt like an illiterate man in a library. Where to start? The picture books? Upon visiting that site I realized a lot of people are out there making tons of money off their blog or wanting to make a lot of money off of their blog. And some people are purchasing books that look like this…
And while I certainly would welcome money and sponsors with open arms, considering I’m a poor person hoping to just scrape by to make this hike happen, my main goal isn’t to bank off of this…it’s my number two goal.
Then there are the ones that you can’t quite tell if they are making money off of the blog or not, but they are just good, well put together. But it makes you wonder…since it looks like they are blogging full time, how do they have time to go to the events or participate in the things that they blog about. My mom’s favorite blog The Pioneer Woman, which has even won some web type awards, is quite polished, even catching my eye with its huge selection of recipes complimented by colorful photography. But it’s so intricate, with so many sections that I find it to be intimidatingly good and I don’t understand how this woman has a life outside her blog.
Finally, don’t forget the millions of blogs like mine, that are out there floundering around in the world of google land or tumblr or wordpress, etc.
Most of this I have realized just recently. It’s like the time my mom mentioned the PODS moving storage. I had no idea what she was talking about. But because she had mentioned it, it was on the brain. Then I started seeing them EVERYWHERE and it wouldn’t stop. Same thing with the blogs, but on a bigger scale.
Random blog things:
- There is a website that links you to hiking blogs alone. Why would anyone who doesn’t know me read mine when there are so many others?
- I still have no idea what a blogging party/blog party is. Please someone enlighten me.
- Oh yeah, please share your favorite blogs…
- But my favorite will probably remain Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century.
In conclusion: There’s a lot of blogs out there. I just find it all very interesting.
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