Technical Aspects of Blogging

My God. I thought I was just here to write. This blogging thing is more complicated than I thought. I feel like the guppy set loose in the big bad sea, with nothing but Google to protect me. I guess it's part of my inherent type-A-ness, but if I'm going to do a thing, I'm going to do it well, with an understanding of the dynamics, the scope, the possibilities. Although I am a bit tentative about writing this, simply because I know I'll come back in a few months and laugh at how sophomorish my understanding was at this time. There are books written on blogging! I am laughing my butt off even as I type this. Hello! If you're devoted to your medium, work within it! There's something profoundly disingenuous about writing a book about blogging. And one of the books I found is nothing more than... you guessed it... a collection of essays formerly hosted on blogs, but gathered together, "to give them context." I shudder. Seems to me that folks actually blogging are the ones to listen to about blogging. And there are gobs of them. ProBlogger has heaps of really deep material that I've just started dipping my big toe into. Performancing.com has the delightful trait of showing me just how much more to know there is. Blogging for Fun and Profit is a kinder and gentler version of similar data. Some of the allure of any given blog is the visual impact. I have seen some glorious custom-designed sites out there, and frankly, I want one. Natalie R. Collins' is particularly striking. I want to break free of the blogspot-generic-template, and do something really fabulous. Course, that involves talent (which I don't have) and money (which I will get more of). Good thing I have webdesigner friends who can help me out. Course, that all just hangs off your blogging platform. I hopped onto this home at Blogspot simply cause it was easy. But no. It's never just easy, is it? I'll be reviewing tools, apparently, thanks to this article from the USC Annenberg School. Frankly, I'm just grateful to, at this point in my blogging career, understand half the language in there. The comparison chart alone sorely tested my new vocabulary. For a lot of folks, blogging is the kinder, gentler gateway to the publishing world. I just found BookAngst 101 this morning, and recognize all kinds of folks I know there. And of course, How To Blog is a huge Technorati category. As it is whenever you start researching something new to you on the Web, you click, and read, and click.... I'm probably hundreds of pages deep just now. And feeling like such a small fish. Discussion, meta-discussion, uber-meta-discussion. I think the toughest thing to hang onto in this firehose of information is.... Veracity. Oh, yeah. Apparently "I just wanna write!" is some form of copout out there in the world. You have to find your group, your designation, you have to get blogrolled, you have to be listed on Technorati, you must have your RSS feed working flawlessly. Monetizing is either a blessing or a curse, depending on how you approach it. The amount of tension is just astonishing. It's like it's some perverse form of competition right out of the gate. As if there aren't enough readers out there, and each one must be courted, achieved, and possessed, to the exclusion of all else. Scarcity thinking, that. There's plenty of bandwith for all of us.