Blogger's Secret

Establishing an identity as a blogger: differences in writing style and substance

What does it mean to be a blogger, as opposed to being a journalist, a twitterer, a writer, or an author?

Bloggers publish frequently, more frequently at the extreme that any journalist would ever get newspaper ink for, and with more freedom to publish directly without editorial interference.  You can be a blogger at once a month or once every few months if time and circumstances demand, but you can also post twice a day and still not overwhelm the medium.  A challenge is to keep up whatever pace you pick; no editor will demand prose, and no editor will cut your flowery words.

Bloggers can write paragraphs, while twitterers are left to only write sentence fragements.

Bloggers post more first drafts and spend less time in the edit and rewrite and fixup phase.  A blogger can take an event in as it happens, produce some credible real time first draft impressionistic transcript, typoes and all, and move on to the next thing.  There is less room for elaborate wording and craftsmanship and more value on the ability to deal with and capture the now.

Bloggers can be biased, and that's part of their earthy charm.  They don't take up the "fair and balanced" cloak of journalism, and don't often have a funding source and corporate oversight to give them credentials and resources the way journalism traditionally protects its own.  The blogger is more of a loosely affiliated opinion writer, often challenged to their right to be in the meeting.  The better bloggers will acknowledge their biases and conflicts of interest, but you can't even count on that with everyone who self-publishes, in print or online.

Several authors are bloggers on the side, but it's madness to think that you can blog and then cut and paste and edit and put what you have into a book.  The blog as format lends itself to tinier fragments of insight and understanding than book-length chapters, and if you are really writing something that's bookish you'll at the very least have to rethink some structure and edit for style before you go to publication.  Many authors (who?) of non-fiction note that the blog as daily chronicle of their active engagement with their readership inform their work, but you don't expect to see Chapter 6 published as a series of posts.

Bloggers hit the publish button as soon as time is up.

Personal identity, a philosophical point of view

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/

Who am I? We often speak of one's "personal identity" as what makes one the person one is. Your identity in this sense consists roughly of those properties that make you unique as an individual and different from others. Or it is the way you see or define yourself. Or it may be the network of values and convictions that structure your life. We might call it your individual psychological identity. Your individual psychological identity is a property (or set of properties), and presumably one that you have only contingently: you might have had a different identity from the one you in fact have. Likewise, it is a property that you might have for a while and then lose: you could acquire a new individual identity, or perhaps even carry on without one. (Ludwig 1997 is a typical discussion of the Who am I? question.)

Who are you? Getting the right tone for the "about" section

One ubiquitous design element of every online system - including your blog - is a brief self-description.

It's hard to write, because you're trying to compress some essence of yourself into way too few characters to really give you a unique identity, yet you have to do this so that people know where you fit in their world.

Rather than right just one of these, here's an exercise to help you generate a lot of them; it's one of my MadLibs style strategies (more on MadLibs some other time).

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Find an intro that you like, strip out almost all of the meaningful words, and see what structure is left behind.  Here are some examples.

I’m a [professional title] specializing in [nouns] for [client roles].  I live in  [location] with my [relation], [name], and our [number] year old [noun], [name].  Learn more about my [noun phrase] services at [corporate name].

Welcome to my [noun] blog. I use this blog to provide a commentary on [noun] events occurring worldwide, including the [nouns] themselves, latest research and conferences and meetings. I am [name] the [honorific] Professor at [name] University in [location].

[Name] is a [noun phrase] and  [noun phrase] Consultant. He is an owner / partner of [corporate name].

I helped create the profession of [activity], co-authored  its leading [noun], and was president of its best-known [collective noun] for [number] years.

I've taken this approach to the current "About" section on this blog, which skips the blackout sections for ..., and as that gets refined it'll be easier to understand.  The term of art for the effort spent on this is "identity work", and we engage in it all the time online.