The Blog at One Year
12/06/2004 09:21 Filed in: Miscellaneous
A retrospect...
ABOVE: Surely if Desiderius Erasmus (1466 - 1536) were alive today, he would be a blogger...
Blogs are huge.
And yet, a lot of people don't know what a blog is. The spell-checker in my blogging software (iBlog) still puts a red underline under the word "blog" to indicate that it may be a misspelled word. Funny.
After a year, I still get an email occasionally from one of you (in fact, I got one last week--you know who you are) asking exactly what a blog is. Rather than retype my answer over and over, I always point folks to the second blog I penned shortly after I started this thing: "Question: What Is a Blog ?"
Well, if you had to ask, don't feel bad, the folks at Merriam-Webster (the only true inheritors of Noah Webster's dictionary ) report that it was the most frequently looked-up word on their website for 2004. "Blog" outranked other lookups including words such as "incumbent," "cicada," "partisan," and "sovereignty."
Some have called bloggers "citizen journalists. They are credited with being the first to call into question Dan Rather's story about George Bush's National Guard service. In spite of some of the junk found in blogs, sometimes they are now the first source of breaking news.
Some people even lost their jobs over writing blogs last year. See "Blogs May Be a Wealth Hazard" from Wired.com
I started "Ricks' Blog a little over a year ago--December 2, 2003 after two separate individuals suggested I do so. Mid-November last year, one of you (you, too, know who you are) emailed me a short little message out of the blue: "You should start your very own Blog. You could review movies, technology and pop culture." Well, that got me thinking about it, and that very quote led to the name of my blog which is admittedly kinda long. When I sat back and looked at it on the internet for the first time, I thought to myself that I may be trying to cover too much: "RICK'S BLOG: Religion, Technology, Books, Movies & Politics". But if it was already long, it couldn't hurt to make it a little bit longer, so I added a line from Steve Martin's movie The Jerk : "And this lamp...and that's all I need... ."
Here are some highlights in the brief timeline of Rick's Blog:
12/2/2003 - Rick's Blog begins !
1/6/2004 - My death of PageMaker story gets picked up my MacSurfer . Too bad I didn't have the counter going then. I probably got a kabillion hits. You can still find the page by clicking on MacSurfer in the first sentence, and then searching for PageMaker. However, the link is broken because I have restructured the way my blog sits on my website since then.
1/25/2004 - My tirade against people leaving shopping carts in the parking lot gets a huge amount of attention, especially from MOTHERS. I follow-up two days later with a column entitled "Walking a Mile in Another Woman's Shoes ."
2/26/2004 - In true blogger fashion, I went to see Passion of the Christ and posted my review immediately afterwards. Quite a number of you told me that you read my review before you saw the movie. And some said that it was the review itself that made you decide to see the movie.
2/272004 - 5/28/2004 - The blog goes on hiatus after only 12 entries as I push aside anything extra in my world. Kathy and I got remarried on March 26 and I spend the next few weeks getting reacquainted to the things in life that really matter.
6/8/2004 - In an attempt at Mo-blogging (don't ask), I lose all my blogs on the software end of things. I have to manually recreate every blog by copying and pasting from my website. I take the time to do some major behind-the-scenes restructuring.
9/28/2004 - I added HaloScan comments and a counter to the site. The comments allow you to leave feedback beyond just emailing me. It's fun. I feel like we have a bit of community here when the discussion starts to build. Also, when I added the counter, my pride wouldn't let me set it at zero. So I guessed and started it at 700 hits. However, I must've drastically undershot because we've more than doubled that number in a little over two months. Oh well. Plus, who knows what it would have been if we could have counted the kabillion or so hits from the MacSurfer link.
11/3/2004 - I purchased the domain http://ricksblog.net and use it as a redirect to my blog. That's much easier to remember than ../../B992311189/index.html.
And now, here we are at one year! I had three goals for the blog when I started it. Two were stated and one was not.
First, I didn't want the blog to become something of a drudgery. I am glad to report, though, that it never has been. I just don't have enough time to write! However, I have enough ideas in my head that I think I could write multiple blog entries everyday!
Second, I didn't want the blog to become a diary. I didn't want this to become too personal because, realistically, who cares? However, I think I've been successful creating a healthy balance by only getting personal when it's appropriate--like the Thanksgiving Day entry.
Third--and this is the goal that I had made only to myself--I wanted to be able to write a minimum of one blog per week. Considering that there are 55 blogs written in the first year, I guess I reached that goal--if you go by averages. However, I've usually found that I go in spurts. I have a slightly different goal for the second year of my blog. I'll let you know in next year's retrospect.
You may or may not have noticed that in the full title of my blog, I include the word "books." But until last week, there wasn't even a category for books. This has been difficult for me. I am constantly reading and I always have books with me. But admittedly, I realize that a lot of what I read other folks may not be overly interested in, and I have wanted to keep these entries aimed pretty much at a general audience. However, I am going to make a concerted effort to change that. I am going to post more about books in the next year, and I would invite you to do the same. Maybe occasionally, you may want to tell others about a good book you've read. Feel free to submit a guest blog review of something you've read recently. I've already asked one of you (and you certainly know who you are) to write a guest review of U2's new CD, "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb." If you don't turn that into me soon, I'll just have to include an entry that says "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ never turned in his U2 review."
Thanks for all your help and suggestions. Feel free to join in the conversation in the comments section anytime you want.
In the meantime, keep reading...
ABOVE: Surely if Desiderius Erasmus (1466 - 1536) were alive today, he would be a blogger...
Blogs are huge.
And yet, a lot of people don't know what a blog is. The spell-checker in my blogging software (iBlog) still puts a red underline under the word "blog" to indicate that it may be a misspelled word. Funny.
After a year, I still get an email occasionally from one of you (in fact, I got one last week--you know who you are) asking exactly what a blog is. Rather than retype my answer over and over, I always point folks to the second blog I penned shortly after I started this thing: "Question: What Is a Blog ?"
Well, if you had to ask, don't feel bad, the folks at Merriam-Webster (the only true inheritors of Noah Webster's dictionary ) report that it was the most frequently looked-up word on their website for 2004. "Blog" outranked other lookups including words such as "incumbent," "cicada," "partisan," and "sovereignty."
Some have called bloggers "citizen journalists. They are credited with being the first to call into question Dan Rather's story about George Bush's National Guard service. In spite of some of the junk found in blogs, sometimes they are now the first source of breaking news.
Some people even lost their jobs over writing blogs last year. See "Blogs May Be a Wealth Hazard" from Wired.com
I started "Ricks' Blog a little over a year ago--December 2, 2003 after two separate individuals suggested I do so. Mid-November last year, one of you (you, too, know who you are) emailed me a short little message out of the blue: "You should start your very own Blog. You could review movies, technology and pop culture." Well, that got me thinking about it, and that very quote led to the name of my blog which is admittedly kinda long. When I sat back and looked at it on the internet for the first time, I thought to myself that I may be trying to cover too much: "RICK'S BLOG: Religion, Technology, Books, Movies & Politics". But if it was already long, it couldn't hurt to make it a little bit longer, so I added a line from Steve Martin's movie The Jerk : "And this lamp...and that's all I need... ."
Here are some highlights in the brief timeline of Rick's Blog:
12/2/2003 - Rick's Blog begins !
1/6/2004 - My death of PageMaker story gets picked up my MacSurfer . Too bad I didn't have the counter going then. I probably got a kabillion hits. You can still find the page by clicking on MacSurfer in the first sentence, and then searching for PageMaker. However, the link is broken because I have restructured the way my blog sits on my website since then.
1/25/2004 - My tirade against people leaving shopping carts in the parking lot gets a huge amount of attention, especially from MOTHERS. I follow-up two days later with a column entitled "Walking a Mile in Another Woman's Shoes ."
2/26/2004 - In true blogger fashion, I went to see Passion of the Christ and posted my review immediately afterwards. Quite a number of you told me that you read my review before you saw the movie. And some said that it was the review itself that made you decide to see the movie.
2/272004 - 5/28/2004 - The blog goes on hiatus after only 12 entries as I push aside anything extra in my world. Kathy and I got remarried on March 26 and I spend the next few weeks getting reacquainted to the things in life that really matter.
6/8/2004 - In an attempt at Mo-blogging (don't ask), I lose all my blogs on the software end of things. I have to manually recreate every blog by copying and pasting from my website. I take the time to do some major behind-the-scenes restructuring.
9/28/2004 - I added HaloScan comments and a counter to the site. The comments allow you to leave feedback beyond just emailing me. It's fun. I feel like we have a bit of community here when the discussion starts to build. Also, when I added the counter, my pride wouldn't let me set it at zero. So I guessed and started it at 700 hits. However, I must've drastically undershot because we've more than doubled that number in a little over two months. Oh well. Plus, who knows what it would have been if we could have counted the kabillion or so hits from the MacSurfer link.
11/3/2004 - I purchased the domain http://ricksblog.net and use it as a redirect to my blog. That's much easier to remember than ../../B992311189/index.html.
And now, here we are at one year! I had three goals for the blog when I started it. Two were stated and one was not.
First, I didn't want the blog to become something of a drudgery. I am glad to report, though, that it never has been. I just don't have enough time to write! However, I have enough ideas in my head that I think I could write multiple blog entries everyday!
Second, I didn't want the blog to become a diary. I didn't want this to become too personal because, realistically, who cares? However, I think I've been successful creating a healthy balance by only getting personal when it's appropriate--like the Thanksgiving Day entry.
Third--and this is the goal that I had made only to myself--I wanted to be able to write a minimum of one blog per week. Considering that there are 55 blogs written in the first year, I guess I reached that goal--if you go by averages. However, I've usually found that I go in spurts. I have a slightly different goal for the second year of my blog. I'll let you know in next year's retrospect.
You may or may not have noticed that in the full title of my blog, I include the word "books." But until last week, there wasn't even a category for books. This has been difficult for me. I am constantly reading and I always have books with me. But admittedly, I realize that a lot of what I read other folks may not be overly interested in, and I have wanted to keep these entries aimed pretty much at a general audience. However, I am going to make a concerted effort to change that. I am going to post more about books in the next year, and I would invite you to do the same. Maybe occasionally, you may want to tell others about a good book you've read. Feel free to submit a guest blog review of something you've read recently. I've already asked one of you (and you certainly know who you are) to write a guest review of U2's new CD, "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb." If you don't turn that into me soon, I'll just have to include an entry that says "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ never turned in his U2 review."
Thanks for all your help and suggestions. Feel free to join in the conversation in the comments section anytime you want.
In the meantime, keep reading...