Reflection Essay: Blogging and Me

Blogging and Me
Throughout the quarter, we were asked to regularly contribute to our own blogs. Our blog posts often covered an array of topics from deforestation to ethanol and corn production. For me, though, it is not so much the content of the numerous blog posts I’ve made over the course of this quarter; it is more about the experience. This was the first interaction I’ve had with blogging and I’ll admit that at first I was a bit intimidated by the whole idea. I know that in today’s age almost everybody has a blog about one thing or another, but I have not been one of those people (bloggers) until I took this class.
The first blog post I made was titled “about the author,” and I’ll admit, this being my first time ever blogging, I was at a bit of a loss for what to say. Even though the content was only about myself, I remember thinking about how this post would be immediately public to anyone who might stumble across it. I recall thinking a lot about HOW I wrote about myself and less about the content itself. I’ve read blogs before and I feel like it’s not always the content that makes a blog good, sometimes it is more about the way that content is presented. My favorite blogs all allow a good amount of personality to come through their writing so I knew I sort of wanted to emulate that style. Especially with my first post, I wanted people to understand who I was not just from the content I chose to include, but also from the personality that I hope came through in the ways I presented it.
After that first post, nearly all of the content I posted was a required post outlining some required content that we went over in class. I have a couple of thoughts about this. First, I feel like being assigned subjects to post about almost takes away from the authentic blog experience. Blogging, to me, is sharing your personal thoughts, opinions, and insights with anyone willing to read, and I feel like posting on assigned things sort of detracts from the overall aesthetic of blogging. We could just as easily have turned in those assignments. That said, though the content was assigned, the responses are very much individualized and genuine. In that way, I feel like this was a good exercise in blogging because it exposed us to this media form. Another thing I quite liked about this blogging adventure was that it became extremely easy and convenient to navigate to and from various classmates work. It is almost like we had a personal forum for our class and it was a cool way to share thoughts and ideas.
Blogs are also much different than writing a paper to turn in. For one thing, I felt like there was much more freedom in the writing I submitted. When I write for a paper, my insights and opinions are always well thought out, well organized, and hopefully well articulated. When writing for the blog, I pretty much became accustomed to writing exactly what was on my mind and it became much more of a free-flowing experience than a structured paper. Also, blogs are handy because they allow you to instantly ad to the content of your post. For instance, in my second blog about clean coal, I experimented with including links to the two websites directly pertaining to my post. To me, this is one of the best features of a good blog. When an author can include relevant links, it really does contribute a quality to the reader’s experience that can’t occur in traditional writing.
Another important element of the blogosphere is the ability of readers to comment on posts. This is something that, as a class, we had a lot of interaction with. We were constantly commenting on each other’s blogs and I feel like this really added to the blog experience. A lot of times in my personal experience, I was able to generate a sort of conversation either with the author or another commenter. Sometimes comments would highlight something found directly in the blog and others, conversation would come that had no obvious connection to the topics discussed in the blog. Comments and commenting has an ability to cover a vast variation of content and it all depends on the reader and what he or she got out of the post. It’s that range that really makes commenting special and unique in my opinion.
Now that the quarter has come to an end, I look back and consider this experience with blogging to be a valuable one. I learned first-hand a lot of blogging skills that, otherwise, I may never have encountered. I became familiar with a truly unique form of media that had often times intimidated me in the past. I can say with sincerity that I have a new appreciation for blogs and the elements that they bring to the table; an appreciation that I’ll take with me on the rest of my ventures through the blogosphere.