PureBlogging

Since I am still relatively new to this blog, and many of you have likely been here for a while, I want to get to know my readers a little better.

I’m starting a series of posts (not sure about the schedule of this series yet) about my favorite blogs about particular subjects.  I will share three blogs that I like in a particular category, and then you can tell me some that you like (doesn’t have to be 3) in the comments.

This will help me get to know the tastes of my readers, and in turn will help you get to know mine.

So here we go. Three Blogs I like about blogging.

1. Problogger.net - This is probably an obvious choice, and is probably on many people’s lists, but there’s a good reason for that.

2. Blogsessive - I linked to a post from this blog yesterday, and admittedly I was not previously familiar with this blog, but having looked through it now, there’s a lot of good content there, and it is a good one to subscribe to.

3.  WhoIsAndrewWee - Who is Andrew Wee? He’s a blogger that’s been one of our iEntry blog partners for a while, which is the main reason I have becom familiar with his work. He doesn’t write about blogging only, but a lot of his posts are blogging-related. Reading his blog you are bound to pick up tons of other great marketing information as well.

Later on, I’ll do different categories like marketing, search, music, movies, sports, etc.

So what are your favorite blogging blogs? I won’t hold it against you if you don’t say PureBlogging

I stumbled upon this post by Alex Cristache at Blogsessive today called “Top 5 Reasons Why Blogging Rocked Our World”. His top five reasons are:

- Blogging gave us back “reading”

- Blogging gave us back “writing”

- Blogging gave us back “thinking”

- Blogging gave us back “evolution”

- Blogging gave us back “empathy”

It’s a good post and I suggest reading it, but I think one big thing was left out. Blogging has given us a way to connect with like-minded (and not so like-minded) people in a way that was not really available before (at least not in such a convenient and engaging format).

Consider what it was like before blogs. Communicating with people online was limited to what, email, IMs, forums, chatrooms, and newsgroups? As posted on Wikipedia, “Before blogging became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software, such as WebEx, created running conversations with ‘threads.’”

Those were all fine, but blogs opened up a door for any average person to write about whatever they wanted to and most importantly have it read by others (feeds have played an important role in this as well). Subjects can be as broad as possible or as niche as the blogger dictates. And not only does that person get to have their thoughts read by others, they get to communicate with those people, and often as a result, relationships are born.  Could this stuff have been done with other tools before? Sure, but not in such an appealing way.

So I don’t know if blogging gave us back communication and networking, but it made it better. Of course social networks have helped too.

Writing with your own voice is a good strategy to use when blogging because you are giving personality to your blog, and hopefully separating it from all the other ones at least to some extent.

When you write for more than one blog, however, it can help to adjust that voice so that it better fits the target audience of each particular blog. For example, I’m writing this for an audience that is interested in blogging, but on my own personal MySpace blog (which is set to private), I’m writing with my close friends and family in mind.

Here I can talk about RSS feeds, Technorati, Wordpress, Movable Type, etc. But on My MySpace blog, not all of my audience will know what I’m talking about, because many of my friends do not work online or share the enthusiasm about blogging that PureBlogging.com readers do. Just the same, I may have inside jokes that my MySpace friends will get, but if I referenced them here, they would fall completely flat (although I do try to inject my own sense of humor into other writing projects from time to time).

When I write for SmallBusinessNewz, I’m not going to throw in a bunch of technical security terms like I might at SecurityProNews, without explaining what they mean.

That’s really the point I’m trying to make. It is easy to forget that not everybody knows about everything you do, and will not understand what you’re talking about if you don’t give them a little help. It’s not that they’re stupid. They may just be well versed in different areas. Sure they can look up things you say that they don’t understand, but why make them? If the core of your audience should “get” what you’re talking about then that’s one thing, but it pays to consider who is reading your blog. Otherwise, you just might risk alienating them.

I’m just going to do the Monday links thing today and highlight a few noteworthy blog-related news items:

- First off, to cap off the week in the National Football League (save for tonight’s game between the Cowboys and the Eagles), Washington Redskins Tight End Chris Cooley exposed himself by posting a picture of his private parts on his popular blog.  I can’t imagine why he would do this. (Don’t worry, the link doesn’t show the pic )

- Keeping in the football spirit, here is a look at how live blogging helps people keep up with games.

- Blogging Tool Zemanta gets backing from Union Square Ventures.  They tout it as “AdWords for content creators”

- JK On the Run has an interesting “Blogging Ike” series.

- And last but not least, THE authority on politics - Lindsay Lohan slams Sarah Palin on her blog.

Here I go again rehashing something I’ve already written about, but so be it…it’s relevant

As I talked about recently, many blog platforms seem to be making a bigger jump into social media, and today Google (who already owns Blogger by the way) has acquired another blogging platform - TNC. TNC claims that they’ve been doing the social media thing longer than most of the other blogging services.

TNC is out of Korea, and many are speculating that this will be the beginning of Google trying to capture more market share in Asia where it is not nearly as dominant as it is here in the U.S.  This might be the case, but I have to wonder if TNC has some back-end things going on that Google is interested in as well. Perhaps things that it will incorporate with Blogger.

Admittedly, I am not really familiar with TNC’s product(s).  I know they have a social tool called TextCube. Usually when Google makes an acquisition, it is something interesting, so we’ll have to see what becomes of this one.

For more on TNC from the horse’s mouth…

It’s interesting to see the wide range of sub-topics being blogged about today as the United States mourns the loss of the victims from the attacks on September 11th, 2001.

Some are simply mourning. Even the outspoken Perez Hilton simply posted one word. “Remembering.”

Some are criticizing the media portrayals of subjects related to the events, going so far as to attack specific anchors (or technically attack specific anchors who are attacking specific political affiliations).

Some are talking about an article written by the sister of one of the people who died in the plane that hit the Pentagon (a particularly heart-wrenching story by the way).

Some are just blogging about 9/11-related news.

I am just taking stock of everybody close to me that I love.