GUEST POST: I Read Blog Feeds Over My Morning Coffee

Hey guys! So, due to vast amounts of crazy-making finals studying/essay writing going on over here in Kat's corner of the world, I decided to put up two lovely guest posts. The first was last Sunday, and here is the second one. I'll resume the normal posting schedule this coming Wednesday :)

-Kat

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Descending from two generations of immigrants, Asia Morela (pseudonym) grew up in France before returning to her native city, Montreal. She's been writing for a long time (both in French and English), but decided only this year to open a blog about it. Though she favours fiction, she also has a lot of opinions she likes to defend in writing.

A few weeks ago I decided to launch a second blog, not instead, but on top of my current one. This raised a lot of questions. Why do I need a separate blog, or why do I even need to post that new content on a blog at all? Do I have enough energy and content to justify having another blog? What kind of energy and content does a blog require to be "kept alive", anyway? But a blog doesn't just need a blogger: it needs readers, comments, to be shared and linked to. How do I do that? How do I seek out new readers, how do I help them find me, and how do I keep them? Having to answer those questions all over again is what gave me the idea for this post.

1) The evolution of the blogosphere

Am I the only one who used to think blogs were mainly online diaries used by teenagers to complain about life, write in horrible colour fonts, share sparkling GIFs and fish for attention? Right, maybe that's because I was myself a teenager back in the early 2000's... and that my very first blog was indeed a private journal filled with angst about what I was going to do after high school. Nowadays, with the advent of a myriad new social medias, the growing up of the first blogging generation, as well as the increased understanding of the risks and potential of the Internet, the type of personal trivia that made up most of the early blogosphere has rightfully receded (at least proportionately). In its place, a whole new model of blogging has appeared: the professional-looking, sleekly designed website whose content is defined by a search for credibility and explicit control over what information is given. Far from the intimate reflection of real life they stood for at the beginning, it looks like blogs have graduated to their own, independent existence. Welcome to journalism 2.0!

2) Blogging, a new type of journalism?

Journalism includes many types of writing*. Of course there's the news, and the supposedly objective rendition of them. But journalism also includes (political, social) analyses, columns, reviews, viewpoints, not to mention the incredible variety of articles you'll find in specialized magazines (recipes, decoration tips, travel stories, history lessons...). While we are right to treat the information we find on blogs with caution, because it has not necessarily been fact-checked or approved by peers, we should also celebrate the democratic reminder that, even when it comes to the most highly respected newspapers or sources, there is not one truth, nor impersonal, objective facts, but only meanings, interpretations, and individuals caught between them. Bloggers, unlike anonymous newsgatherers, show their colours!

Moreover, as more and more professionals take up blogging, it is also less and less accurate to claim that bloggers are random nobodies voicing uninformed opinions. In fact, many of us have credentials we could use in a resume, and we usually prefer to write within our field of (relative) expertise, be it literature, high jump, or the city we live in! But blogging is not just traditional journalism gone online. If the seriousness of some personal blogs must be underlined and praised, there is one other, invaluable thing blogs offer us: freedom. Sure, we want to be read, liked and respected, and that--surprise!--involves rediscovering some basic, age-old rules of public communication (clarity, accuracy, authority...). But we also want to be ourselves! We want to share not just our knowledge and talent, but also our doubts, questions, mistakes, and learning process. More than a 21st-century competition with traditional journalism, blogging is actually this unique, original media which allows the perfect mix of the personal with the general, of honesty with perspective.

3) Finding your place in the blogosphere

The originality of blogging owes more than a little to its comment feature. Bloggers post whatever they please, but anyone is equally free to respond, criticize, challenge, discuss, or conversely to approve, confirm and congratulate! Although the content of blogs is not controlled at its source, it is indirectly judged and rated by the traffic, interest and feedback it gets. Creating a blog is extremely easy, yet the satisfaction to own a blog only comes with having readers and creating a dialogue with them--and that's not nearly as easy! Quality posts, originality, consistence and perseverence are key (I follow a blog which now gets a hundred comments on average per post--the blog has been around for five years, and hardly got any comments at all in its whole first year of existence). So is networking.

Networking is the final reason why I LOVE blogging. Because looking for bloggers with similar interests, discovering new blogs, getting caught up in the lives and experiences of people from all over the world, finding out about all the cool stuff that's being done out there, is really, truly fun. And inspiring. The no. 1 rule to get known within the blogosphere is to read other blogs and leave comments. But even if you initially do it for yourself, you soon find yourself hooked on a multitude of blogs you hadn't even known existed. Soon you're really blogging to exchange views, to reply or echo other blogs, in short to be part of this exciting blogging world that welcomes your input so readily. I don't read newspapers over morning coffee (never did). I read blogs.

And all of this, is what blogging means to me, why I continue blogging, and why I feel ready to blog even more.

* I am deliberately ignoring TV- and photojournalism in this post, but I know they exist, as much in traditional as in social media.