What Makes a Good Blog

I feel i should clarify some comments i made at last week's lecture, as i feel they may have been a little unfocused.

Peter asked "What makes a good blog?", here's what i think:

Firstly, the true beauty of the internet is that enables just about anyone to voice their opinions, loves, dreams, interests and, in fact, their very selves on to a public sphere. But there in lies the issue, the internet is a public area, not a private one. There are private aspects to the internet but if you post a blog, build a website, comment on myspace, discuss on forums these opinions are available for almost all to see. There is an unfathomable amount of content on the internet which means that if someone in our class were to write "I hate Peter Saladino, his opinions are those of a moron" chances are slim that people who actually know me will ever find it unless they happen to google me, but even then there are a few other people with the same name as me who have a greater presence on the internet.

So the internet is big, really big.

But it's still a public place. So to return to my comments in class that a blog should be "interesting" and should try and convey some "ideas" obviously these are fairly broad generalisations for any piece of writing. The girl in the white top (sorry i don't know your name) pulled me up by suggesting that what is interesting to me may not be interesting to someone else and that that is there way of doing their thing, which is totally true.

Did Ann Frank think her diary was going to be a thing of such historical value? Did she think anyone would read it? Did she even think she was going to survive? Probably not. So any account of event or representation of opinion is important, and i believe this.

I don't remember who said this but it's something like "the internet has given the idiots a voice". Harsh words but there is some basic idea i like about it. Writing a blog is not the same as writing in your diary which no one ever sees and is purely for your benefit only. This doesn't mean that people can't post personal diary-type entries, or simple accounts of everyday events but i simply feel that some people posting on the internet have no idea that other people might read this, and they should.

Which brings me to my poorly articulated example of eBay descriptions. Ebay is awesome, it let's anyone sell or buy anything. But they amount of times i have viewed an item where the description either barely describes the article or is so full of spelling and grammatical errors you wonder how they even managed to crawl out of the womb at birth. Did it even click in their head that they are trying to sell something? They should be convincing me to by it to the most truthful degree and the best of their abilities. These people can't really be this simple, surely. I don't know who these people are, perhaps english is their second language, perhaps they were in a hurry but sometimes you almost feel like you know this person has not taken any care in providing this nugget of information to the world.

Perhaps Peter can comment on this but, when we submit essays do we not do as much as we can to ensure that our ideas are coming across? Sometimes there is less time, less inspiration but that's why we have gradings. Peter surely you must have read some essays and simply thought "This person just doesn't care, they're not trying articulate anything" and given it a big fat "F"?

When a news paper makes an error they publish retracting statements, when you submit an ad or obituary or article or opinion to a newspaper someone still reads it and edits it. On the internet, we must exercise as much of this as we can over our own work. The whole world has access to this.

What i want to see on the internet is engagement. Not necessarily high IQs or rocket science or perfection or ideas exactly like my own, I just want my brain to be engaged by something: by an idea, by communication and by thought. I want to know that someone, somewhere is trying to tell the world something.

Sorry for the high level of uni student bullshit, i still don't feel i said this well. Perhaps that is ideal though, that although my words are not perfect, the very fact that someone may read this and have their brain stimulated in some way will make this a successful blog.

Comments? Flame away!

(PS I wrote this in a hurry!)