Well.
Every time my mouse reaches for the 'New Entry' button, I wonder about this whole Revolution that I'm meant to be a part of.
As far as I can see, the world, or parts of it, have stepped back to allow bloggers room to impress. The thing is, we aren't out for impressing. We aren't out to turn anything over. Regardless of how you view it, all bloggers as a whole are out for, is speaking.
We type and speak and have our say.
If anybody was expecting anything more than that, well...sorry.
We're doing our thing. Sorry if it wasn't what you hoped it would be, or whatever you thought it might become.
We will raise our voices.
That's it.
We weill raise our voices to political, religious, or social ends. We will raise our voices whenever and wherever we feel like it, and that's the whole thing.
Our voices can and will be raised, and the records of our voices will stick around forever in search engines and cache and memory.
If you were looking for more of a revolution than that, you might think you've set your standards too high, but then again, we might think you haven't paid enough attention to the revolution we're already offering.
I'm a personal blogger. I don't pretend to be anything more. Occasionally I will post about something outside of that remit, but I don't have strict rules. I will post whatever I want to post, and so will everyone else, and good on them for doing so. What journalists fail to see in their 'Look at these crazy people' articles, and what politicians fail to see when they bypass the opportunity to become bloggers, is that we have voices. And no matter how loudly we are heard, and no matter how quietly we are heard, we have spoken.
And despite everyone looking to the future, when it is considered what was said about what matters...our voices must be taken into account. And as accounts are taken, and time piles up...the opinions of people, not just their voting choices, must be taken into account.
...and that's it.
Hear hear! And I will add to that my inflammatory opinion that given that bloggers are only doing what they want to do when they want to do it, trying to make money blogging or getting paid to blog seems completely against the grain of the point of blogging.
hmmmm.....
... nope, i'm not impressed
So Stu, you saying I don't impress you? Damn?
K, if their is no point to blogging, except that blogging is what you make it, then surely their is space for bloggers who make money out of perhaps doing something well? Be this via adds or patronage, or being paid by a paper of other website to write articles for it, or by getting hired for their design skills or whatever? Otherwise you are kind of saying since the point of sport is to have fun, we shouldn't have paid professionals either?
Just my 2c. Very humble and all that.
I think of professional bloggers as "columnists". I read them for their political or literary points of view, and while I appreciate the occasional glimpses into their private lives, these seem more manufactured to me than, say, a blog like this. Or any of the others I orbit in the mornings with a coffee cup sitting next to the computer. It is the sheer serendipity allied with the great prose that makes this reading experience a nice way to start the day. A blog like this one makes people in general more interesting to me; it illuminates a different life than mine. For me, that's all it takes.
There, Simon said it better than me. It's not that I don't think there should be paid bloggers, Adrian, but that it loses something vital to the experience for me. Simon used the word serendipitous - he's right. Reading a paid blog is like reading a newspaper. Reading a regular blog is like hearing a story from a friend. And while many "regular" blogs that were like that have tried and are trying to transition to paid without losing the freshness, I'm not seeing it working.
Oh, and for reference, I'm not talking about just throwing googleads up on your site which just helps defray the cost of running a blog. I'm talking about being a professionally hosted blog.
Blogging is also about interaction. Probably you will never meet the people who read your blog. Sometimes you might change someone's opinion on something. Sometimes you might make someone feel a bit better about themselves. Sometimes you might change their lives completely. It happened once by accident on my old blog where a woman left her family and moved from America to live with a blogger in England because of something completely daft I had written on my blog which caused them to strike up a conversation.
One line on one blog might cause someone to take up a social or a political standpoint which might make a massive difference to their community or even the world.
Even if as a result of reading something I have written, someone plants a few bulbs or puts up a birdbox, I regard that as something worthwhile.
K that all depends on what kind of author the blogger is. I agree many bloggers can't make the transition.
And I do think personal blogging will struggle to make the transition most, you will get personal bloggers who are that good (Dooce?) who will find opportunities. But review blogs and political blogs and technical blogs have all made the transition and as with anything their is some good and a lot of chaff.
I also think their is more to being paid to blog, than purely running a blog from a professional site. I think the definition you give is too limited.
Adrian, I DID mean personal blogs, you're right. I think other kinds of less personal blogs naturally transition to paid content.