Scrapblog Series : What is a Blog? And Why Blog?

Why Blog?

There are many reasons and opinions behind blogging. Perhaps a very good rendition of this from a craft designer’s perspective can be found at Designerzine / April 2006 Edition, where Carla Sylvester has written an article on this, and quotes quite a few scrapbloggers. However, Designerzine requires paid for signon, and only members can access this article. If you are a member, I would recommend reading it.

There are many other essays available freely over the internet to discuss the benefits of blogging, some of which are summarised for you in the next section by myself. I will also link you to many of these articles should you still need convincing. But firstly, below, you will find an article I wrote several months ago, but never published until now, which gives you some of my own reasonings behind having a scrapblog. The entry was written in retaliation to a forum thread I witnessed pooh-poohing blogs in total. This was on a scrapbook forum, and it became obvious to me that the people doing the criticisms of blogging perhaps weren’t aware of many of the benefits, or even when they might have been reading one.

For some blogs, it can be quite easy to see why some people might have a negative impression of them - particularly when some are very personal, and the blogger has decided to write journal entries about small events in their daily lives - ie a visit to McDonalds, or to the supermarket. But blog beauty is always in the eye of the reader, and that person’s blog might well be a top favourite in their family circle. Judging all blogs by this criteria seems to be obtuse to understanding how powerful a tool a simple (and often free) weblog may be, in all areas of one’s life.

What is a Blog?

First, a Few Points -

1. Many people don’t recognise a blog when they are reading one. In fact quite a few popular newsy websites are based on blogging software - they allow periodic chronological entries, submit these to the web, and have a columnar look about them.
2. There are now over 30 million blogs on the internet worldwide. Blog software is often free, easy to use, and freely available over the internet. This blog software allows many people, who may have struggled to create and design their own little website, the ability to have a piece of the internet to themselves within a matter of minutes. And to update it regularly. The web is no longer the domain of a few web designers or Internet Service Providers. It is now an open virtual community available to anyone with internet access.
3. The scrapbooking world has opened up to blogs as a publishing format in a huge way, and there is an equally large body of information available to ourselves, and shared freely in the blog medium. Blogs are now themed towards helping us out in design principles, photography skills, scrapbooking opinions and news, digital scrapbooking resources, and providing pure inspiration in all sorts of paper crafts. In fact, a large subsection of the blogging millions is actually found in the theme of crafts.
4. Marketers and Large Corporate companies are now moving comprehensively into blogging as a way of forming a more human face with their customers. Blogging is now a recognised big business option.
   • There are now professional bloggers hired simply to blog, or having their blogs published as books. Blog awards abound, conventions run, and there are hundreds of Blog experts simply doing blogs about "blogging".
   • And there are people who have been blogging and making a living out of it - or at least a good wicket - by the revenue brought in by their adsense or google ads using on their blogsites.
     
5. Blogs are just websites. There are good ones and there are bad ones, and if you haven’t found a good one, then you’ve not been looking very hard.
   

Blogs Vs Forums

1. Some people like forums. Some forums like particular people. And for that reason, others don’t quite feel such an involvement. Cliqueness in forums is as much a pro as a negative dependent on whom you are talking to.
2. People who prefer forums generally have many reasons towards this - the most prevalent being the feeling or sense of community that you may get when seeing your thread responded to so quickly.
3. However, there are two things in common between both forums and blogs -
• Comments. These are response posts on forums, but most blogs allow a freedom in commenting also.
• A sense of community. In a forum, you may be part of a group of 10-20 people that you feel inclined to suggest these people are your friends. But on a blog, you can build similar relationships with regular readers and commenters. Statistically, there might be many more on a forum - but tell that to someone like Ali Edwards who consistently receives over 100 comments on any blog entry she does.
4. Both are virtual - sometimes we forget that.
5. Forum communications can be much quicker, but also more transient. A hot thread of one day can be off the top pages by the next, and never to be commented on again. Blogs provide an individual web publication which may be slower, but search engines love them. New comments can arrive on a blog post of months beforehand and surprise the author (they’ve certainly surprised me, when someone comments on something I wrote months ago).
6. Forums and Blogs are complementary, not contradictory or competing - the objectives are different. For many, a blog is a piece of the WWW of their own, whilst a forum is the chosen homebase to find like-minded thinkers and opinions.

So What is a Blog, Already?

1. It’s a personal (although it can be a group thing also) webspace.
2. Defined in the Blog Wikipedia -

A Blog or Weblog is “a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. Like other media, blogs often focus on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news. Some blogs function as online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic.Since its appearance in 1995, blogging has emerged as a popular means of communication, affecting public opinion and mass media around the world. ^[1]

Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog softwareweb hosting services." on regular

Blogging Definitions

Blogs and associated definitions are defined in this entry (to come...)
 

Why Do I Blog?

I’ve been blogging for two years now - over that if you count some old archived entries. In that time, my blog has been primarily towards my own views and opinions on scrapbooking. The content is normally not towards my own personal life, or my child’s most recent visit to McD’s. It’s about scrapbooking. Looking back now, I realise it shows my movements through scrapbooking and finding a style and moving from traditional paper-based crafts into the world of digital. It’s a comprehensive history of my own involvement and movement in this craft. It is "me".

In that time, I’ve learnt so much - from comments given, from emails received towards many of my articles, and I’ve also hoped to welcome other scrapbloggers into the vast community that has now formed around me. My own blogroll of scrapbloggers is now perhaps one of the biggest in the world, and my blog, Scrapability and I have been quoted in several scrapbooking magazines from this - including Simple Scrapbooks Digital 4, Paperkuts, and Scrapbook Answers.

My blogging has also opened up vast areas of the scrapbooking world not available to me before. I have made virtual but downright lovely friendships with many international and sometimes wellknown scrappers, several UK-based scrappers, and can count quite a few digital designers as being a supportive readership (and now sponsoring) of my blog. I recipricate of course, and spend a lot of time reading and commenting on other’s blogs, building a network of blog friends with information that matters to me.  I may not ever get to meet those people in real life, but I realise from my blogging, that my world is much vaster than I ever thought it might be a few years back.

My blogging has become a secondary career (unpaid of course) and has opened paths towards many reviews, design team jobs, the odd freebie, and certainly a faith in my own ability to write. People have been supportive of my attempts and also my problems when suffering bandwidth problems and complaints from some strange people.

My own blogging career is not normal, I know. And it is not something which I would suggest others may well want to follow. In fact, I’d appreciate not having the competition out there! But all of this came from a lot of long hard and dedicated work (my scrapblog list maintenance takes hours alone nowadays) - but that is a choice I’ve made. But I still have so much fun blogging, and writing, designing up new banners and blogwares, themes, getting comments, musing over these, getting emails, and simply blogging about a part of my own (and family’s) life.

Despite my own "career in blogging" (if you can call it that), I would suggest that if you did take a look around many scrapbloggers, you would find several similar themes -

The Pros of (Scrap)Blogging

1. Blogging builds your writing ability. This changes how you actually create layouts also.
2. Features on blogs allow you to create personal galleries of your work. For "professional" scrappers this allows the blog to become a professional resume - especially helpful if you’re interested in providing design team work for magazines, competitions, or design companies. The marketing potential for you as a designer is enormous with a blog.
3. Blogging keeps you in touch on a personal basis with family and friends. Blogs allow a connection and community with people. They don’t need to troll through large forums to find you - you have your own website.This was one of the first reasons I opened a blog - to provide an easy (and free) webspace for myself to communicate to international friends who lived 12,000 miles away, and really weren’t inclined to register in a scrapbooking forum just to speak with me, or see my photos. 
   

The Resources (Links)

 Discussed in the article above, the following resources are well worth checking out if you have some browse time.

• Why Blog? Article by  Carla Sylvester at Designerzine (requires registered login)
• Blog - Wikipedia - this wikipedia provides a wonderful resource, with discussions on blog types, aggregators, blog services, the works.
  
• Forum4Bloggers - yes, there’s even a forum (probably more than one) for bloggers - with forums on things like distribution, marketing, building readership, measuring readership (er, your stats), content pointers…
• Article (on a blog) about different types of blog posts.
• More to come (this resource section will be updated as I go…)
  

Comments

[ConversionJunkie]

This is an awesome article. I learned a lot of great tips and pointers. Thanks for the information!!