Nov302008
BlogHer ’09, Here I Come
Filed under Meta by Kim at 11:30 am on Nov 30 2008
I swore I was not going to be meta at all this month, but on the last day of National Blog Posting Month it’s kind of hard not to.
Friday night we sat down with Genie and Rich and we ended up talking at length about what it’s meant to participate in NBPM, what we’ve learned from blogging over the long stretch of time before that, what privacy means to us, and a whole host of other things. This was obviously really great, because duh, really smart folks.
Everyone who blogs asks themselves (probably frequently) “why do I do this?” And the list of answers is too ridiculous to list here. I often answer this “to be accountable to myself” or “so I can remember what happened” but there are also the shadow reasons “to be outgoing” or “to get attention”, for instance. Lots of people do it to practice writing and I figure as long as I don’t mention that or claim to be any good at writing and totally disavow any claims to writerliness, I avoid a whole mess of judgment. I know that many people (at least try) do it for the money – but I don’t know any of those folks personally.
So regardless of the whys, I have, at this posting, managed to post every day for a month. And I think there’s been a pretty good content/dross ratio. But on this the last day of NBPM, I have also signed up to attend BlogHer ’09. I justified this out of my vacation budget. I’m still not exactly sure what I’ll do there apart from extend that conversation I just described to a thousand new people who feel at least as passionate as I do about blogging. I don’t have a concrete desire to drive traffic. I don’t have one topic or identity.
What I like is to make contact with people, and blogging has just recently paid off in just that way. When I got home last night after a long drive, I found in my mailbox a package all the way from Australia from someone I linked who writes for The Rising Storm. In one of my first posts I’d mentioned I wanted to contribute towards the efforts to send Mental Notes gold in Australia, and this total stranger helped me do just that. And sent a bonus CD. Now that’s what I’m talking about.
So now you can look forward to only hearing from me when I’m sure I have content I want to share. At least until next November.
1 Doryon 30 Nov 2008 at 11:44 am
I don’t know any In Real Life bloggers. I sure wish I did. Maybe someday I’ll be able to meet some of the fantastic people I’ve met through blogging.
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