Category: Weblogs

1. It’s too easy to post that interesting article to Facebook or Twitter and not say much about it.
2. I wasted the last hour reading updates on Facebook.
3. I don’t want to break other people’s news. The ideas that really fascinate me are the ones other people tell me about … and they haven’t written about them yet. They never seem to get around to writing about them and I don’t feel like it’s my role to break their news.
4. I don’t know where to post it. Should my funny dog post be two sentences on Facebook or a post on my personal blog or should I create a dog blog or should I guest post on a dog website?
5. I don’t want to deal with the flame war. A lot of really fascinating ideas have become really hot topics lately and nobody seems to be able to debate them even semi-objectively.
6. I don’t want to deal with hate mail. The last time I posted what I thought was a personal post about how I deal with life as a woman at conferences, women from around the world came out of the woodwork to tell me I was stupid and wrong and harming women.
7. Too personal. I used to feel like I was sharing my blog with a group of friends and friends of friends. Now it feels like I’m sharing it with the world. Forever.
8. Too invasive. I have lots of stories that I now write down but can not share because it wouldn’t be appropriate to share that about people. I don’t remember having this problem so I don’t know if I used to write about people confident in the fact they wouldn’t read it or if I just wasn’t as tempted by the stories of other people. This is particularly true for me for stories about other parents.
9. Too much social media. It feels like we spend so much time sharing the moment on social media, with people that aren’t here, and then checking to see how many people liked it, that we forget to live in the moment. The answer to this would be less social media, not less writing, but what happens is that I write less.
10. No RSS reader. It feels like Facebook has replaced RSS readers, so I no longer feel like I have a following on my blog. Blogs are more dependent on SEO and social media than they are on a following which really changed the audience and the conversation.
11. Higher standards. Blog posts used to be something people wrote daily. They often were not polished. Now blog posts are expected to be well polished, often with professional editors and multiple levels of review.
12. No pictures. Where’s my picture to go with this post? Should it be a selfie of me not writing? Or a stock image photo? Can you publish an article without an image any more? Medium says you should add a high resolution picture to capture people’s interest.

Why aren’t you writing more?

As most writers can tell you, you write for somebody else. You write because you want someone else to read your opinion, your knowledge or your funny stories. The problem is that many of us bloggers don't know exactly who we are writing for. A couple thousand people a day may land on your blog and despite the best analytics you may not know who they are. And who you write for may change. I originally started writing for my friends but over time I've picked up a large readership, many of whom I don't know personally. A very small percentage of readers actually leave comments so I don't really get a chance to know them.

I ask who you blog for because lately I've gotten a lot of comments about what I'm writing about, and I have to say, I've found some of them flattering, some of them funny and some insulting. I write about what I find interesting or important and I hope others find it interesting or educational, that's why I share it. I don't believe I actually write for any one audience. (Although occasionally I have an audience in mind when I write a particular post.)

So here are some comments I've gotten (I find many of them funny) and my response:

• "You don't do much work, you're always talking about surveys or hunting or kids." Hmm, this is Stormy's Corner, not Stormy's job log. While I tend to work a lot, I do lots of other things too and I write about whatever I want to share at the moment with no thought on how much I've blogged about "work" versus "family" versus "hobbies". (You can read about my work in the Foundation blog. And see the next point.) So if you think I have too much time to write about other things, I think perhaps you should get a few hobbies of your own too. Also note that most posts take me 20-30 minutes so it's not like I'm spending hours and hours writing …
• "You write too much about work." I actually feel kind of bad for my readers that started reading this blog before I was allowed to blog about work and now are learning much more about open source software and GNOME than they ever wanted to know. Well, guys, it is an important part of my life, and I do think it's really important you understand how important open source software is for our world. Hopefully you can tell from the title whether or not you want to read the post and skip the rest.
• "Your posts are really different than the other posts on Planet GNOME
  and I appreciate reading about topics I wouldn't otherwise think
  about." Thanks!
• "You blog about hunting." Actually, I think I've only blogged about hunting once or twice. I understand many of my readers are vegetarians. Many of my friends and some of my family are vegetarian. My hunting posts are mostly about the people I hunt with not the nuts and bolts. Hunting is actually a highly controlled sport that is used for population control and revenue generation in the states, and I don't think it's evil but I'm not going to talk lots about it one way or the other. I don't push hunting here and I'd appreciate if you wouldn't insult my kids because you don't like the fact I hunt.
• "Where do you find time to blog?" I usually blog about things I've been thinking about. You could say I blog when I'm walking the dog or driving the car. By the time I sit down "to blog", I can usually type up the blog post in 20 minutes or so. (And sometimes I don't have enough time to think about any one thing long enough to construct a blog post – see the last few weeks …)
•  "Where do you get your ideas?" From everywhere, all day long. I have a list a mile long on things I could blog about. Hopefully I screen enough of them that my blog is interesting. It seems to be working for my current readers.

So who do I write for? I don't really know. I know my readers contain:

• friends
• family – A couple of years ago I discovered that a great-aunt I hadn't seen since I was 3 years old was reading my blog! How awesome is that? I've also gotten to know a few of my cousins better though blogging.
• Planet GNOME readers
• Some press folks
• GNOME people
• People interested in open source software
• People whose blog I read
• People who think my kid stories are cute (who doesn't 😉
• People who found one or two of my posts really useful and so subscribed to the rest
• People I've met at conferences, …

Who are you and why are you reading Stormy's Corner?

Who do you blog for?

My top 11 blog posts of the year. (11 because I didn't want the first one to be about me.)

The top 10 is never what I would have predicted but all topics I think are important.

11. Fundraising for a technical nonprofit
    
10. I'm the new Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation!
9. Cheap mini-laptop
8. How I'm learning to create effective presentations
7. Sneak preview of my talk next week: "GNOME as the computing platform for the future"
6. What do you have: time, resources or features?
5. Learning not to cry in today's workplace
4. Alabama literacy test: would you pass?
3. 20 things you can negotiate in a job offer
2. KDE vs GNOME
1. Why do netbook vendors make their own distribution?

Blogs are like diaries but they are public.  They are obviously meant to be read, to be shared – otherwise why put them on the web, right?  That said, there are some blogs that make you wonder why people are writing that in public.  And I have to admit that lately there’s been a few times where I had to stop myself from writing something on my blog – something I was upset about, wanted to share, but probably shouldn’t share with the whole world.  (For example, imagine you are upset with something a colleague did or said at a meeting and it’s so Dilbertesque that you want to write about it.   I had second thoughts on the wisdom of writing about that …)  People that write blogs like that try very hard to keep them anonymous.

There are a couple of blogs that I follow that I’m not sure why I read them.  One of those is Violent Acres.  I feel like I’m reading someone’s diary and yet I enjoy reading it.  Some of the things she says are things people never say in public but make total sense to me.  Like why are women obsessed with being fat?  Or of course she’s writing for traffic not for herself, or she would have just written in her diary and stuffed it under her pillow.  So I can’t understand why this reader got so upset about it:

This is why I’m done reading Violent Acres:
“For the official record, though, of course I write for the traffic. If
I were ‘writing for myself,’ I’d type this shit up in microsoft word
and put it under my pillow. I’m here to entertain you. If I wasn’t
entertaining you, I’d likely stop writing…despite the fact that this
site does turn a profit.”

That absolutely sickens me. Some of the things that V wrote about
were very personal, tragic, and terrible. Very few people (me being one
of them) would understand what it is like to go through some of the
things that she wrote about. And now I found out that she wrote these
things for a profit? What am I to think about that? Were any of them
actually true? Did she embellish her stories to draw more people in? It
is my belief that anyone who writes for traffic can’t be trusted to
write honest content.

Basically, they no longer plan to read her blog because it was written for an audience!  Did they really believe that Violent Acres was writing a diary in public for herself with no regards to who read it??  They obviously wanted Violent Acres to keep up the charade.  (By the way there’s a lot of hoopla right now – people are trying to figure out who Violent Acres is.  I agree with the group that says "I don’t care."  It’s highly unlikely I know the person anyway … and I’m not really worried if her stories are 100% accurate or not.   I read them because I enjoy reading them.)