Aussie Bloggers

Today I recieved a flyer from the local shopping centre telling me Santa arrives next weekend! Where has the year gone? Apparently Christmas is only a few short weeks away (shh! don’t tell my bank account).

Along with the many Christmas parties, end of year break ups, planning family celebrations, holidays, finding caretakers for pets and then the new year celebrations, your blog will probably be wanting some attention over the break.

Some people (me included) have used the down time to fiddle with their blogs – change hosts or themes, and generally do a bloggy tidy up.

But what about your readers? Are you going to cater for them over the break? Are you going to pre-post before you head off on holidays? Or will you be staying home and tinkering in the back rooms of your blog?

This year we are off on a long family holiday, about 5 weeks all up. Fortunately I’m planning on taking at least one laptop with me – probably two (shh! Don’t tell my hubby though, he’ll have a fit!) and will be blogging as we go, as we have so many exciting things planned I want to share with my readers.

What about you? What are your plans to take care of your blog over the holidays? Or are you staying home and planning a complete overhaul?

Isn’t it funny how websites and social networks can inspire and be responsible for the creation of offline social groups and sub-communities where people who are members of such sites and networks take their online interaction into the “real world” extending the depth and scope of that interaction, taking advantage of the richness of real-world communication and moving out of the context of guided or controlled interaction.

For example I co-coordinate the local Canberra Twitter usergroup … basically a bunch of local Canberran Twitterers who get together for lunch or drinks every couple of months, and we usually have between 6 and 14 people turn up to those events. It’s a lot different from chatting via Twitter and can be occasionally awkward to meet someone you’ve been chatting to via Twitter for months and think you know them but when it comes to social small-talk you realise you know them in a different way to what’s applicable to that particular situation. You may know their day-to-day struggles they experience with their job but not even know if they’re married or have kids. But it’s nice to have a completely rounded relationship with people you consider friends … and so we have these meetings to put faces to names, real names to aliases.

Another such group is the local Canberra flickr photographers group. Just like the local Twitter group we’re not sponsored, endorsed or supported by flickr in any way. We all love flickr and it doesn’t bother us that we promote flickr and have built a massive community around flickr (over 600 members online with close to 70 people turning up for big events like the annual flickr gala) and get nothing back from them … though if anyone from flickr is listening and feels to support us it would be nice to have some financial support for events like our gala *grin*. But flickr was the hub that enabled local photographers to find each other and coordinate our regular meets – in fact our next meet is this Saturday for Floriade and the Nara Candle Festival in Canberra. Flickr has provided the platform for this interaction to a point but clearly many people want to take that further beyond the webpage and now some of us have close friendships that started offline and matured offline.

In fact I met my girlfriend through flickr as we are both members of the Canberra flickr photographers group – so for that, flickr, thank you!

Websites can only go so far and they shouldn’t try to cover off all interaction needs of their users but expect that offline communities will be spawned and attempt to facilitate and support that.

If you are not a blogger but are curious and interested to know if blogging is for you, there are ways you can give it a go without making any commitment to it, time wise or financially.

Two of the major and popular hosted blogging programs, Wordpress.com (not wordpress.org which you host yourself) and Google’s Blogger (blogspot), are free and simple to use. Once set up (which is easy to do) the only skill you really need is being able to type; two fingered will do.

You can set your preferences to private if you are not ready to publish your words to the world, if you only wish to communicate with a chosen few or just want to journal your own thoughts or experiences for future reference..

• Blogs are a wonderful way of keeping far away family and friends up to date with the happenings in your world in words, photos and video clips.
• You may want to journal just a particular time in your life: a holiday, your baby’s rapidly changing first months, a child’s wedding, your own wedding, the renovation of your house….
• If you are researching a subject for work, study or hobby, recording it using a blog gives you an easy to access record, with more flexibility than a word processing program.
• You can just use a blog as a private personal journal, recording your thoughts and feelings. Writing stuff down can be very therapeutic, helping rid yourself of of frustrations or depressed thoughts or helping you organize your thoughts if you have a problem to solve.

The possibilities for a subject matter are endless and blogging software allows for ease of categorization and dating, making it simple to find things again later. Online blogging software allows you to post entries from anywhere – while at work, travelling or visiting friends.

If or when you wish to make your blog available for all to read, remember that everyone can write and share something that someone else, somewhere in the world, would be interested in reading about – knowledge, expertise, skills, experience or experiences, favorite pastimes, opinions, beliefs, a sense of humor….

Writing publicly and having your blog read by others can be a wonderful confidence boost although blogging is not all about one way communication. Having contact with others that share your interest areas is the real bonus with blogging. Communication takes place via the blog commenting system initially but email or real life contact can be established and you will likely find your way into other online groups of like minded people. It can take some time for people to find your blog, so do not be discouraged if you do not have many readers for a while. There are many ways of helping people to find your blog.

If you are not ready to set up a blog of your own you can still venture into the world of blogging via community sites, such as Ning where all you need to do to start is to join up; your blog is then ready for you to start entering content. Some of these also allow you to maintain your privacy or share with a chosen few.

Although you usually do not have the same control or amount of features and are less likely to reach a lot of people these sites do have some advantages. Some have existing groups that you can join or you can start one up yourself, some have features that cater for particular subject areas such as travel.

I will give more details of these community blogging sites in my next posti – if you are a member of any you find worthwhile please let us know in the comments to this post. In the meantime if you are interested in learning more about blogging please join our forums where you will find information and motivation to help you get started (or ask questions and someone will help you)

When people say they are feeling homesick, typically it’s one of two things:

• they miss their family, friends and/or pets
• they miss the familiarity of their surroundings

I recently spent three weeks in Europe with my partner. It was a short trip and I didn’t miss my family, friends or pets… and I didn’t feel alienated by the unfamiliar surroundings, in fact I fit right in and can’t wait to get back. But towards the end I did start to experience a strange sort of homesickness that I can’t think of a good word to describe.

Websickness? Internet separation anxiety?

For the first week in Krakow, we had internet access in our apartment, I spent 30-45 minutes keeping up to date each day, and all was good. But after that we went to Rome where access was decidedly more difficult – and we were way too busy seeing the sights to expend much energy looking for connectivity. Then camping in rural Germany – obviously a wireless-free experience. It was internet cold turkey and I was not coping well!

So what was I missing? The feeling of connectedness with my friends, family and the wider world that I get from Twitter and Facebook and Flickr. Writing on my blogs and getting feedback and comments. The daily routine of checking in on forums like the Aussie Bloggers Forum and the various mailing lists I participate in. Not to mention the 200-odd blogs I regularly read that I was missing out on!

In fact, I think that if I just had one of those things – maybe a half hour email check each day or if Twitter actually worked reliably over SMS – I wouldn’t mind the absence of the others. But taking away the whole internet was too much in one hit.

Does this mean I live online? How do you cope with extended periods without internet?

I used to be a “cool” blogger, running a very open blog about my life. I ranked highly on technorati, I woke up every morning to an inbox full of comments and I entered a “Babes Of Blogland” competition and, I’ll admit, did fairly well for myself.

Then I spawned.

When I announced that I was pregnant on my blog I was very positive about it, of course this wouldn’t change the subject matter, I’d still be writing reviews of all the movies I’ve been to see lately, I’d still be posting regular photos of me (complete with superb “MySpace Angles” and high contrast) and of course there would still be plenty of gory details about my love life. My biggest fear was ending up as one of those women who had nothing better to do that write about their child’s bowel movements, a fear of becoming a dreaded “Mummy Blogger”, I told my readers not to fear, that would never happen to me!

Lets just say, that didn’t go to plan, as I progressed in my pregnancy I wanted to write more about what I was going through, and knew that my audience of twenty-something single men couldn’t care less about how my foetus was currently hiccuping and that my internet “fame” would probably suffer if I was to start discussing the less than attractive side effects of pregnancy, not wanting to disappoint anyone I just slowly stopped blogging. I started up a little blog, not even self hosted, told my family about it and wrote about baking, decorating for Christmas and just how badly I was waddling at seven months pregnant. It was almost liberating, I stopped caring about comments – I think I averaged about one a fortnight when I started out, I wrote freely about everything I was going through, and when my son was born I officially stepped into the world of mummy blogging.

I don’t have the fabulous technorati ranking anymore, I have a select following of readers of whom I think my husband is the only male in there, I have been to the cinema three times in the last two years so there are no more movie reviews and I think my love life has similar statistics so no more writing about that. I’m officially a lame “Mummy Blogger”, but I am happy, there’s no expectations, no one moans that I haven’t posted for a couple of days, because there just isn’t enough people to miss me, and best of all I have a wonderful detailed history of the first years of my son’s life, there’s no flicking through baby books any more, I can tell you the day he walked, and his first words just by looking through my archives and finding the video clips posted to celebrate the occasion. No longer am I fearful of the stigma attached to being a parent blogger, I revel in my lameness and don’t even long for the bygone days of Interweb fame.

And at least I’m not a Cat Blogger