Red ~C Diary: Blogs and Bloggers are Not Created Equal

(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)

I've been blogging for almost three years now. I've met a lot of people online and offline because of my blog. I landed a cool job because I blog. Yet my blog is still virtually invisible within the vastness of the blogosphere. I'm really serious whenever I say that I think I only have around ten (10) frequent readers. If you look at the comment section of my entries for the past couple of years, most of them (like 90%), are Zen-like in their emptiness. No big deal. That didn't stop me from keeping on. I'm still at it going strong. I even have three interconnected blogs to prove it. I don't call them ~Ubiquitous Nirvana just to be cute.

But even with my experience with blogging, I always continue to learn new things from people who've been blogging for a while. Case in point: The 120 Day Wonder: How To Evangelize a Blog by the uber VC Wizard Guy Kawasaki. In it Mr. Kawasaki listed his blogging tips, in the context of his marketing experience. I find some of his tips very useful, while others I don't resonate that much with, simply because my approach and intention for blogging is different than his.

For example, one of Mr. Kawasaki's tips is to think of your blog as a “book” not “dairy” – to present your blog as a “product.” That's a cool advice to make a blog of higher quality than the blog next door. However, in my case, since day one I've never thought of my blog as a “book” or a “product” that I'm out there to evangelise. My blog is primarily for expression. It's more like snapshots of this stream of consciousness. It's neither a diary nor a book, but it can also be both. I make extensive use of tags and categories to organize the streams into sub-streams in order to have clearer context when read from a higher vantage point. But I don't plan them ahead. I just let the context and the connections between context happen over time. I have more trust on serendipity than my own ingenuity.

Another tip from Mr. Kawasaki is to ”answer the little man.” This is another useful advice. I also find myself talking to the “little man” before I blog something of significance. What is the value of this rant? Am I just trying to make myself look cool on this post? What am I trying to accomplish with this essay? Is this post compassionate or would it create more suffering? However, there are times when I just post whatever. And there are also times when the “little man” is wrong. This is my blog you little man! Shut the f*ck up and just let me FLOW!

Then again, Mr. Kawasaki's tips, as useful as they are, are not for the majority. There will always be bloggers who would rant and destroy rather than create value. There will always be bloggers who would focus more on themselves rather than ideas. There will always be bloggers who would focus more on ideas rather than themselves. And there will always be bloggers who would do all of the above. That's because bloggers go through stages of moral development. And so their blogs too.