Saturday, July 23

About Writing a Blog

I HAVEN'T SEEN IT YET but today is the first day that the Turlock Journal is running a digest version of this blog. The editor at the newspaper is selecting entries and compiling them for the column.

It will be interesting to see if one can make a jump from online to in-print. Most of what is happening in the journalism world is going the other direction -- not that newspapers will become extinct (Although, if the SF Chronicle continues to lose a million dollars a week...) -- or that they will go completely paperless (at least not in the next 10 years). But that is the way things are going.

It is fun to be back in the newspaper. When I was in high school I edited our paper and then at San Jose City College I was the Op-Ed editor. I did an internship with the San Jose Sun and what was then a chain called Suburban Newspapers. When I moved to the Phoenix area I wrote awhile for what was then called the Mesa Tribune, but is now the East Valley Tribune. After finishing my undergraduate degree in communication (with an emphasis in mass communication) at Arizona State my writing energy was all channeled into papers for seminary.

I write off and on for magazines and journals, and even occasionally newspapers. However, most of my writing goes into sermon preparation.

About three years ago, though, I got hooked on this blog thing, hoping that I could connect with what were at that point mostly the geeks in the blogosphere. Things have changed and now most bloggers aren't all that geeky.

The things I like about blogging are -- the informality, the ability to link to what others have done or said, and the option for immediate feedback. There is a sense in which these abilities function together to help one define a level of community with readers that you just can't get in print. For example, I read a lot of other blogs (see the column to the right for a list of some) and many of these people have become friends through the medium. Some of the bloggers in my sphere are even people with whom I have philosophical disagreements. The blog facilitates a level of conversation -- not always -- but often enough.

In my blog I simply write about things which are of interest to me -- and my interests are varied. So, this is not a theme blog and it's not really targeted to a specific audience -- other than those people who share some interests with me -- or would like to.

There are currently right around 100 hits a day to this blog. Following the tsunami I linked to a video clip of the incoming wave. Somehow Google featured that link fairly highly and I was getting about 25,000 hits a day. I figured out what was happening within hours and was able to set-up some links that enabled readers to make donations to disaster relief agencies. The flexibility of the medium allows for a high level of responsiveness to whatever is happening.

If you'd like to try your hand at blogging here is a simple introduction. Let me know if you start something. I'd like to have a look.

2 comments:

theultrarev said...

Whenever I read your blog, I have this sense that you are at the computer at that very moment reading the nonsense on my blog. Your blog is interesting. I like your sense of humor. I offer as a critique that your blog traffic would increase with a little more nudity. I expect my blog traffic to skyrocket tomorrow.

Hope you make it big in the newspapers. Say something controversial and stir things up a little.

Brad Boydston said...

Steven the "ultrarev" Evans wrote:
"Whenever I read your blog, I have this sense that you are at the computer at that very moment reading the nonsense on my blog."

I probably am!

In regard to the nudity -- I'll pass. There's not room for another pastor who puts up pictures of naked people on his website. :-)