You Can Blog: Live (Part 1)

I’m closing in on chapter 7 this week, How Blogging Can Help Your Relationships. I figure I’m going to write this chapter online so you can enjoy and hopefully get excited about your copy when it comes out. It is a draft and will likely be hacked and slashed before submission. But Enjoy the segments and comment on it if you wish. :)

Without further adieu… How Blogging Can Help Your Relationships.

Chapter 7: How Blogging Can Help Your… Relationships

Not too long ago, Jeremy and I both had the pleasure of attending a dinner in New York City with some folks that have been involved in a large way in the blogosphere. These were not the kinds of people that hold themselves up as important and the mouth pieces of the blogosphere but they were important nonetheless.

As we dined at a wonderful little barbecue joint on West 44^th street in Manhattan, we talked about things that bloggers all have in common – blogging and its effect on lives. We discussed other bloggers and some of the things we enjoyed about them as well as the things that irritated us.

To protect the innocent, I won’t mention names specifically, but a common understanding I took from that dinner and the week I spent up there was that bloggers who are full of themselves may get lots of traffic, but might not get as many friends.

You see, blogging is all about relationships. It is easy to take the notion that it’s just the blogger and his computer and think of the interaction that takes place therein as simply a digital experience. Maybe we have an idea of little digital gnomes manning the digital gears and pulleys and magically creating the interaction that is there. But it’s not.

There’s something particularly interesting about the dynamic flow of human interaction that plays out in a well manicured blog. It is something that should cause human behavior psychologists stop in wonder.

This chapter is all about that dynamic human relationship that takes place in the context of a blog. How does it play out? What forms does it take? How does it grow? I’ve often said that blogging is a microcosm of life and that the same patterns and normalities that are in life, play out in the blogosphere. A blogger’s greatest strength is recognizing those natural tendencies and capitalizing on them.

Meeting New People

In the early days of the internet as we know it now, there was America Online and chat. While chat is still fairly popular among some groups, it can be argued that much of that interpersonal interaction was moved into forums and blogs where the demand for real-time communication was not as urgent. This was important for a society that was becoming increasingly busy with technology and the ensuing demands on their time.

During those early days of digital communication, there was a certain mystique, and even suspicion, about computers and the internet. Today, business opportunities are commonly pursued between individuals who have never met face to face when at one time, such activity was seen as dangerous and risky. Today, people commonly use the internet as a way to meet potential dates, when once it was viewed suspiciously as the territory of creepy old men.

As bloggers, most of our interaction comes with people whom we have never met in person. In fact, our little corners of the internet often involve people from all across the world whom we may never meet in person. On my blog, I commonly encounter people from Europe and Asia as well as in my own backyard in Maryland. Far more readers come who may never involve themselves in the conversation, but will daily read the entries that I put up. That dynamic flow of human interaction is exactly the strongest benefit of blogging.

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To be Continued…

Tagged as: Blogging, book, you_can_blog