Looking Back on Blogging

Looking back helps me see how far I've come. In November 2006, when I started blogging, I hardly knew what it was, and I assumed I wasn't invited. (See all my posts on blogging.) My post on blogging etiquette posed some questions and my blogging friend Kris (www.misskris2005.bravejournal.com/) answered them all with great insight and common sense. Apparently many bloggers are making this all up as they go along and it was fun to get their responses. This is info that any serious or new blogger will enjoy reading, and then combined with growing experience will allow anyone to join the club and make a difference.

Joining the club just means establishing a blog. Blogger walks you right through the process, and there you are minutes later, published at last. Finding blogs to read is easy. First go to Google Blog Search, look up some topics you'd find interesting. Click on those blogs, explore them, and those they list on the side of their own blogs, called blog rolls. When one rings your bell, visit and leave a comment. Invite them to visit and read your blog. Do this a few times, visiting, commenting, making blog friends and you'll soon have a blog roll yourself. Blog surf occasionally and you'll make connections with blogs and their owners that you'll enjoy.

That brings us to some reading you'll like as you get serious in your blogging world and start realizing this fabulous, lasting and influential new technology that you are actually helping to invent. Visit one of my favorite blogs, Time Goes By, and read her great ideas about the blogosphere. She links some other articles by Jay Rosen on Pressthink, and HuffingtonPost.com

I'm quoting Ronni Bennett:

You may think that's just a little blog you're publishing, something about your town, or a book you read or the Grand kids. But it is much more that that. So long as there are millions of users keeping watch over media, government, corporations and others who would seek to influence us, they become more accountable, and
liberty is furthered and democracy is strengthened.

This quote is even more touching when coupled with these words from Jay Rosen, and the critic A. J. Liebling:

"Freedom of the press belongs to those who have one." Well, freedom of the press still belongs to those who own one, and blogging means practically anyone can own one. That is the Number One reason why blogs matter.

With blogging, an awkward term, we designate a fairly beautiful thing: the extension to many more people of a free press franchise, the right to publish your thoughts to the world.

This makes my new hobby of blogging even more meaningful to me. I'm not looking back. I'm blasting off for the Blogosphere, here in my home office, after midnight, with my beloved Mac Mini, dressed in my jammies, knowing I truly can help save the world and contribute to world peace! My voice shall be heard!!