I just got inspired for this article here, where Aditya Mukherjee talks about how and why he blogs.I want to talk about that and about why I read blogs – as this is something many people here in germany don’t understand or just don’t want to do.
Aditya Mukherjee tries to get better, develop his way of writing and wants to present his ideas to the world. He tries to keep track of his personal progress. These also motivate me to blog. I’d also give people I know the possibility to read my ideas even when we don’t have real-life contact, as this makes people keep connected. And keeping connected is important to everyone of us. Its not the meaningless facebook-friendship, but the possibility to read, what the other person’s up to. Thats also why I’d love to see more people I know blogging or at least using Twitter. They might think I don’t care about them, but the point is that nobody likes to ask everyday “Hey, whats up in your life?” – and given that you have more than one or two persons you know, its better to have a push- instead of a pull-mechanism to get their updates. When something is important to a friend, I’d like to know it. If he put it on twitter, I get that update. If he even writes a longer blogpost, I still can decide if I’d like to read that thought of if its not important to me.
And writing blogposts isn’t a big deal wither. Okay, it takes some time, and at the moment I can’t find much time to do that either, as I just finished studying and will begin working in a software company tomorrow – and just bought a flat with my girlfriend (well and you have no idea how much time it takes to pick the tiles, the lamination, every bit of the kitchen and get all the bureaucracy done). But writing helps me to order my thoughts and to improve my english. And perhaps someone I happy to hear from me again. You never know.
Same with reading blogposts. I began subscribing to a small number of XML-feeds (from blogs of people I know), but learned some other great blog, that I like to read. Some of them are technical, some are philosophical, some are both. Lately, I posted a blog-link to someone who might have been interested in it, about a management technique that is used in his work and what often goes wrong with it. The response I got was “I don’t have time to read blogs – and this stuff in blogs is all pure theory and has nothing to do with the real world work. And by the way, everyone can read blogs.”
This somehow stroke me. Someone who doesn’t read blogs tells me that everyone can do it. Well, I agree that everyone can read, but reading blogs with content that is about your profession or about stuff you care about is important information for your life. And of course you can’t do that if you don’t take time for it. Some people read the newspaper to know what happens in the world – and they take their time to do that. Some read professional magazines – and also take their time to do that. So whats wrong about reading blogs?
Well, I guess the problem is, that its not really commonplace in Germany to do that. People here are always 4 years behind compared to the trends in the USA – and blogs in Germany are often thought of as homepages where people show off the newest funny stuff they found on youtube. If you’re really picking the good quality stuff, you get much more personalized information than you’d find in any newspaper or professional magazine. The writers are not professional all the time, but who cares? Iknow my posts are not too well thought-out too, but hell where’s the problem? You can skip every blog entry as you could flip a page in the newspaper.
Now back to “everyone can read blogs”: indeed. But not everyone can be patient enough to read blogs, to find blogs that delivers good content and to digest that information in a ways that helps you in your everyday life – or work. Its the same with books. Everyone can read them – but that doesn’t mean everyone takes time to do so. Hell, perhaps it would be better to read books, but if you’re into computers you’ll soon realize that the world changes too fast for books to be cutting-edge.
Well, nevermind. Just a lifesign from someone who doesn’t find much time to blog at this time.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Talkin’ Bout a (Blogging) Revolution (gigaom.com)
- You are Crazy not to Measure the ROI of Social Media! (newcommbiz.com)
- Get A Life: Being Involved Online Is Still Suspect (stoweboyd.com)
This post made me thinking, why I am blogging. I’ve thought about this, but more on an subconscious level. You’ve got some important points here, like improving yourself. I’d like to add another one: For me it’s also to become more aware of my own opinion, that is, to have a better structure of why I believe something to be good/true/bad etc. It helps, formulating it for yourself, at least for myself.
About the non-use of blogs in Germany: There somehow seems to be a rather large amount of people, who are either afraid or unwilling to learn about the new technologies. Not sure about the reasons, maybe they think it’s too complicated (maybe it is!), maybe problems with the spread of a foreign language like English (in the end, even in German blogs there is an abundance of internet slang, mostly coming from English). I think it will change within the upcoming years, but also the software we use should be improved towards easier access.
I’m mostly blogging because I can and its easy. Its also a way to should out stuff to the world that I think someone else could use one way or another. Sadly I don’t find much time to blog, or I don’t take it for blogging. For the short stuff I shout I like the use of twitter better.