I Miss Personal Blogging

I wrote my first blog post on July 2, 2002 after seeing a friend do it for a little while. I loved how it was a peek inside of his brain that I didn’t see any other way. As I began writing I found I did the same thing. I’d share my raw emotions in my blog and it felt good. Every day I could see what my friends were thinking about and doing in their lives. I loved it.

Emily - Journal WritingI’ve had to change how I blog a little bit. As more people began reading my ramblings I couldn’t be AS honest as I had always been because I realized the reach of a simple post was greater then before so I had to at least think about what I was saying a bit before writing it. Plus, we’ve all written that blog post that gets taken wrong and then you have a big old mess to clean up.

But, I have to be honest and say that I miss the old style of blogging from the heart rather then blogging for the search engines.

Yes, I understand the power of SEO and I get it. Hell we all write posts that we hope will get attention. But, at the same time I wish some people wrote more top of mind, from the heart types of posts more often. As I went through my morning surf of reading almost all of them had a comment on a new tool, reaction to someone elses blog or a list (since everyone loves lists).

But, out of the 40 or so blogs that I scanned through only 3 of them had anything of a personal, slice of life, type of post.

I have always written about whatever is on my mind. Some days that is fun with the family and other times it is commentary on the new media world I work in. I write what is on my mind and that can be a large variety of things. Sure, that means my blog will never get any sort of ranking, but I’m fine with that. It is the way I approach blogging and it is what works for me.

Am I the only one missing personal blog posts? It never was only about cats. *grin*

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 8:42 am and is filed under Rambles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  • This phenomenon is why I think LiveJournal will never die, because THAT is where you can still emit stream of consciousness, from-the-heart, self-exposing emotional blog posts and control the audience. The more public my blog becomes, the more I post on LiveJournal when I want to share the things that I can't have posted publicly (which I have to be really careful about, as a therapist). Current blogging is great for certain things, but my LJ contains the raw emotional stuff that I share with people I trust to handle my raw emotions more gently than complete strangers. :)
  • It's gotten away from what blogging really was and I can't say that I miss all of the personal crap, but I do miss the personal touch and voice that blogs used to have.

    I think it's nice to have a good mix and still pull your keywords/phrases for search.
  • I have been thinking about this exact thing latley. But for me its been about getting back to actually writing again vs doing everything in video. Writing is something that I can start and stop, do from my iPhone, or real quick from a public machine. Video takes so much more effort that I find myself not doing it half the time when I really do have something to say. I need to change a few things on my site and how I want to position it but I feel a big change coming for me...
  • I completely changed what I was doing with blogging in order to focus on topics that were important to me in the professional realm. However, I am unable to fight posting personal stuff on that blog too, because it's MY space to write. So I write about some marketing stuff and things on the internet that interest me, but I've also written blog posts recently about my grandmother being one of my closest friends and another about guilty pleasures, both of which have nothing to do with my professional goals. I think that everyone needs to find a happy medium when wanting to blog about different topics, or find another space to write about things they would like to express but not so publicly.
  • Initially I was caught up in the euphoria about "business" and "personal" meshing in this new, social media space. And although I still think recent technologies have injected wonderful elements like informality, clarity and transparency into official channels of communication, I'm no longer so sure that the content is evolving as well--at least not as much as some speculated at the outset.

    Yes, we do associate individuals with brands more than before (e.g., Scott Monty of Ford), but do we really care that much about those people's personal lives? It's nice to have a face and name attached to the information, but the information I'm interested in is still about Ford.

    Further, as you mentioned, sometimes it’s just not prudent to broadcast your personal takes on matters because they’re being read by more and more people, and could inadvertently damage your reputation.

    Thus you have two factors:
    1. people expecting official, business related content on social media channels; and,
    2. content producers growing more aware and wary of exposing their personal expressions online

    I feel that they both contribute to the waning (or increased hiding) of personal online content.

    I just don’t see as much mixing of business with pleasure as I thought I might have by now.

    It’s not a bad thing, necessarily. It just tells me that the dividing line between professional and personal is thicker, and possibly more needed, than I assumed.
  • I started the Journey Inside My Mind back in January 2002 to be a personal journal and collection of things I'd found on the internet. Over the past 7 years, I have gotten VERY raw and emotional, as I hashed through some things I've had to deal with.

    In 2005, I began podcasting and my blogging slowed down a bit. In 2006, Twitter came along, and I realized that much of what I blogged about now was able to be put up on Twitter. With Twitter Tools, I'm not able to archive these posts on my blog each day.

    Most who have read my blog or who connect with me online have said that it's this personal authenticity that attracts them.
  • Personal blogging assumes that you have a personal life that's worthy of public attention. My personal life is deeply boring* by design and what isn't boring isn't for public consumption or Google to rehash decades later. There's a lot that goes on outside of my personal blog - just not for the general public to see.

    * deeply boring = no drama, catastrophes, etc.
  • I'm right in the middle of personal blogging and I love it for all the reasons you mentioned.

    I have met some fascinating people and have made some strong friendships while learning about myself and being educated on a wide variety of subjects in the meantime.

    Yours was one one the very first sites I visited back in August before I knew this "world" even existed.

    I still think you do a good job of bringing a personal touch to your posts.
  • Don't get me wrong there are still plenty of people out there doing it, but I remember when it was the norm rather then the exception.
  • There's still Dooce. Heather entertains me more than 99% of personal blogs anyway.
  • Allow me to introduce you to the magic of Wordpress Categories. By using the checkboxes, you can list things in the "personal" or "new media" or whatever categories. Once that's done, you can tell WP to reformat specific posts based on their category (or, if you want, separate the categories into their own pages).

    It doesn't force you to pick one or the other, you can post content that fits both. But at the end of the day, you can make it so your readers know which posts are "blog" content and which are "business" content.

    Of course, if you'd rather just inject some personal stuff into your everyday posts, that works too. Lord knows we all need to speak about our whole lives, not just the professional side.

    Pax,
    Matthew
  • Tam
    I have two blogs now. My old school one, which is a little too raw for public consumption and is hidden from search engines, and a more public one that I advertise all the time. I blog with a bit more care on the public one, but it is still very personal.

    I'll always be a "cheese sandwich" blogger and if I don't get any traffic, that's perfectly OK. I don't really blog for the masses anyway.
  • Wait, I'm supposed to be writing posts with SEO in mind?
  • Yeah you're right about that. When you start getting more readers you easily start wondering how wise is it to be completely transparent, and so on.

    But the truth is, the blogs that I *really* still follow and read, all have a very personal component to them, one way or another...
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