Best wishes,
Benton

What do you blog for?

How much traffic do you get?

Do you think of yourself as a blogger?

Okay, let me do this again, since I accidently just deleted the entire comment I wrote . . .

- Do you make money off your blog?
- What is the ROI of blogging? (this is mostly a business question, but one I hear quite a bit)
- How do you find time to blog?
- What should I (questioner) blog about?
- How long have you had your blog?
- Isn’t it weird that people you don’t know know so much about you?
- Does your company/boss know you have a blog? Are they okay with it?
- Should I start a blog? (The answer is usually, “depends, do you want to start a blog?”)

Questions I think are key:
- What do you get out of blogging? (which is quite close to your “why you blog” question)

Will keep thinking about it . . .

* What do you do if you want to start a blog?
* What’s the difference between blogging platforms?
* What’s corporate blogging? What businesses blog and why?
* If you have a business blog, what are the pros and cons of enabling comments?
* How do you respond when people say negative things about you or your business on their blog?
* What’s a blog again?
* How do you have time for blogging?
* How do you promote your blog?
* What value do you get out of blogging?
* How do you make money off your blog?
* How do you manage reading all those blogs out there?

Happy to help
We recently created a blog for my work and my boss who is a very young 69 had a hard time understanding the need for a blog as opposed to our “newsletter” that is emailed out to our clients every couple months. We often have questions on our newsletter that we hope clients will send their responses via email back to me. My boss also participates in message boards dealing with Organizational Development. Theses are some of the questions that were asked of me during my push to get a blog in place.

What is the difference between a blog and a newsletter? People still read the same articles and respond….

How does my blog get out to the public?

What makes a blog different than a message board?

What makes a blog interactive?
How do I regulate what people say and do on my blog?

How can I bring together groups from similar industries with my blog? How do I create the perfect entry to unite all groups together?

What if no one reads my blog?

These are some of the questions that were asked of me, but some of the questions I ask of others and myself are

Are blogs free from barriers imposed by race, SES, and gender?

Can blogs be truly neutral spaces?

How can I use blogging in my own dissertation- a critical analysis of UNESCO educational policies in Sub Saharan Africa?

Can we create a hybrid blog like noah does that people who blog actually meet once a month?

How does the blogging change once you are made “public?”

I hope this helps Leah. I often look at blogging in terms of creating the conversation for my work, professionally and socially. I can participate in conversations that help me bounce ideas off unknown people and open my mind up to new alternatives. My research looks at Sub Saharan West Africa and educational policy imposed on them through UNESCO. These children are participants in the One Laptop per Child program and there is a blogging feature available on it. How can this create tranformatory dialogue? How can blogs be tools of anti-bias and anti-racist education? These are my personal questions I ask myself.

If you need anything else, don’t hesitate to ask and hope this is what you were looking for,
Bonnie

I have a blog, but post infrequently for many reasons, not the least of which is lack of discipline. I think Jeff, above, is right on with the why of this Q. We blog because we think we have something others should be hearing from our unique perspective.

2. Do you read blogs? If yes, what is your favorite and why? If not, why?

I read blogs, but only a few with any regularity: 1 - noahbrier.com, daily 2- streeteasy.com,daily (because of my addiction to the NYC real estate market) 3 - http://www.downes.ca (Stephen Downes on education, which I read at least weekly) 4 - dabearsblog.com, regularly (because Noah created the blog and Jeff is a damned good writer

3. Do you consider the ‘blogosphere’ a community? If no, why? If yes, what kind of community?

I think there are many kinds of communities within the blogosphere, mostly made up of people with particular interests and/or in specific fields. For example, when I’m looking for restaurants in NYC I check chowhound.com because I know the people who comment there are real NY foodies, not just anyone who’s been to a restaurant. There are many people who post there regularly and I expect that many of them know each other. I also think communities have grown up around noahbrier.com and dabearsblog.com — there are definitely many people who have come to ‘know’ each other through their comments on the 2 sites, and I’d bet that if somone from either site sent out an invite, a lot of them would want to come, just to meet the people they’ve been ‘talking to’ in the last few years.

4. How does connecting with people online change the nature of interpersonal relationships?

I’m not sure it changes the nature of the relationships. It may limit it a bit, because geography may preclude face-to-face contact, but I think real relationships can grow from being part of a blog community. I, for example, ‘met’ the mother of another tech-savvy son when I mentioned his work in a comment I left on Noah’s blog. She e-mailed me and we subsequently met in person, talk occasionally, etc.

5. Does becoming part of an online community and/or being a part of a new generation of writers change your thoughts on blogging? Why and how?

I definitely think my views on blogging have changed the way I view writing and communicating in recent years. I think blogging encourages interaction and reflection in the same way written correspondence did years ago, but the circle of communication is so much larger, there’s just so much greater an opportunity to see and think about varying points of view. From my perspective (in case you didn’t know :), I think some variation on the blogging theme will play a central role in the future of education.

2. Do you read blogs? If yes, what is your favorite and why? If not, why?
I don’t know what the hell is a blog anymore. I read Huffington Post and Drudge Report because it gives me a ncie political balance and the opinions are more interesting than Wolf Blitzers. I read NoahBrier.com because I need fodder to mock him with. Other than that, no I don’t.

3. Do you consider the ‘blogosphere’ a community? If no, why? If yes, what kind of community?
These people don’t care about each other so NO it’s absolutely not a community. Just because you can “link” sites together doesn’t mean they should be considered unified in some way. If I go to the magazine rack at B&N and there’s an ESPN Magazine next to Sports Illustrated, is that a community?

4. How does connecting with people online change the nature of interpersonal relationships?
We don’t know yet. Because the blogger generation hasn’t completely disconnected with the rest of us yet, though it’s coming. I think so much about the internet is just a terrible thing but anyone who would let the internet ruin their actual human interpersonal relationships deserves to have those interpersonal relationships ruined and is probably not going to be missed at the bar Saturday night.

5. Does becoming part of an online community and/or being a part of a new generation of writers change your thoughts on blogging? Why and how?
I am amazed at our site’s ability to reach people, though I hope this doesn’t birth an entire generation of people thinking they’re writers. Very few of these sites are well-written but it just doesn’t seem to matter anymore. As a matter of fact, the IM/text/MySpace/Blog revolution is actually destroying the construction of sentences nationwide.