The Blog & the Journal - Writing About You -. Cecilia Jr. Tanner

      The blog can be a corporate webpage that communicates directly with the reader, but more often is your own personal newspaper, reporting your take on the current events, on people in the news, on music, art, on just about everything. The latest comment appears on top of the page.

      Some personal blogs are themed on a single subject, such as sailboats or chrysanthemums or Mexican vacations. But just as often they are simply online journals.

      Unlike websites, most good Blogs are interactive, inviting your readers to respond to your ideas, thus also functioning as a social network. Many bloggers have set themselves up as critics; food critics, movie critics, and so on.

      (Microblogging consists of very short comments.)

      The beauty of the blog is that you don’t have to meet some editor’s rejection or biases. You can sport your own style, dancing on the digital highway to your own drumbeat.

      Many blogs have become established sources of information, virtual newspapers like the Huffington Post with thousands of readers every day. The Huffington Post starts with the big full width headline story and with three columns below. The left column has the feature article with “featured Posts” below that are comments sent in by readers. The middle column is photos of news items and other topical interests, and the third column is social news, the arts, the music, the entertainment items. The layout is exceptional with lots of pictures and color.

      But for most bloggers, the Blog is a very informal personal affair, with comments, photos, information, solutions to problems, recipes or car repairs. The nature of the content is infinite. We may not anticipate that the information we have to share will be exactly what someone else needs, but many times when one Googles for information, the search engine will find the search words in your content, and you will meet someone else’s needs.

      Say you search “how to fix my Bayliner fridge”; the search may find in the content of someone’s blog in Ireland, “fixing my Bayliner fridge.” And if you are in Fiji, you can benefit from that person in Ireland who has succeeded in solving your problem.

      Often to find this type of special information, a searcher will use the Deep Web, using the search engines that can search for “deep content” like www.searchenginewatch.com or www.bing.com or medical engines like Mednar or PubMed.

      Blogs need a platform on the Web to upload your Blog. And there are many free platforms that you can use, most are oriented to the special purpose of the blogger.

      //livejournal.com is primarily for blogs and journal postings. Has more than 19M blogs and journals on the Web.

      //blogger.com is Google’s blog platform and is very popular.

      //www.tumblr.com features mostly micro-blogging for posting short messages like tweets on Twitter.

      //wordpress.com is mostly for professionals and forbids the placement of ads etc.

      and there is //www.posterous.com, //bravenet.com and many others to choose from.

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      As in writing any journal, there are better ways to write them. And the purpose of the journal/blog dictates largely how you will write them. Fiction is crafted in a deliberate direction, but the journal unfolds unpredictably with reversals, and shocks and all manner of unexpected changes. And this makes journals fascinating to read.

      In Arthur Ponsonby’s ground-breaking recognition of the journal genre in the 1920s, he even picked the top nine diarists and discussed their merits.

      Unlike Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebooks, which Lessing said are “made up from beginning to end”, the corporate blog is all about authenticity and transparency and honesty. There have been several corporate blogs that thought to be cheeky and edgy but were found to be deceitful, and the companies were held up to considerable shame.

      But the personal blog seems to be anything the blogger chooses, fiction or non-fiction, usually a conscientious sharing of the writers bon mots and bon thoughts revealing only what they want to reveal.

      When creating the public work, however, some attention should be paid to making it entertaining, making it interesting, giving it better readability. And a work is interesting if you strive for honesty rather than artifice, incorporating your own sense of value, be it brute revelation or tender beauty.

      All the suggestions throughout this book apply to the writing of an effective journal or blog. You will want to have style and eloquence, and style is always found in one’s cleanest truest expression of self, and eloquence, though it may sound 20^th Century, is simply the powerful use of language.

      Developing Flexibility With Words