why blog?

Amid the rain and the gales that have been lashing our fair shores...(goodness what have I been reading) I have been thinking about blogging.
Why blog? What is the point?
Do you have something to say and are there people who want to hear it?

Why do I blog?
Answer...to have a net presence, (and coz Fifi told me to...)

The current view in the international writing community is that if you are an author you must have a net presence. But what sort of net presence do you need?

The viewpoint of Jane Friedman( see no rules blog in sidebar) is that you must have a net presence where your audience hangs out so if you are going to write young adult you should have a my space page flickr bebo etc etc

If your audience is not net savvy, (and who is that these days?) then it is not so important.

The concept of having to maintain pages in various social networking sites is daunting.
If an author has a huge net presence you have to wonder when they find time to write anything at all, see cynsations(sidebar) to get an idea of what I mean.
That’s when you find little ads where people offer their services (for a fee) to do the blogging/ social networking stuff for you....

Chris Brogan(chrisbrogan.com) social networker extraordinaire has some ideas on what a social network should be doing for you. Here are a few of Chris’ ideas...

• social networking Blogs allow chronological organization of thoughts, status, ideas. This means more permanence than emails.
• Podcasts (video and audio) encourage different types of learning, and in portable formats.
• Social networks encourage collaboration, can replace intranets and corporate directories, and can promote non-email conversation channels.
• Social networks can amass like-minded people around shared interests with little external force, no organizational center, and a group sense of what is important and what comes next.
• Social bookmarking means that entire groups can learn of new articles, tools, and other Web properties, instead of leaving them all on one machine, one browser, for one human.
• Blogs and wikis encourage conversations, sharing, creation.

To see the rest of the list http://www.chrisbrogan.com/what-social-media-does-best/

In the meantime I will try to follow some of Chris Brogans maxims...like always post regularly and keep a supply of interesting things up your sleeve for when you have space and time to fill. I won’t be getting any myspace or bebo pages yet, I’ll leave that to the teenager in the house... and work on my launch speech. I was reminded by Pippa (Pippa Werry a fabulous NZ Children’s Writer-she should have a web presence...) to write one today.

maureen