This post forms part of a series. Read the first installment.
Words: Pete Ashton
Illustration: Raymond Weekes
Last week I alluded to how writing for blogs is different to writing for print, but don’t think that means it’s inferior. Professional writers who trade on the value of their words often find it incredibly hard to adapt to the medium. They’re locked into a particular style that serves their purpose, be it journalism’s Inverted Pyramid and short paragraphs or the structure of an academic essay.
What I think defines a typical blog post is how conversational it is. The tone will be closer to a letter and quite often it won’t be reporting all the facts or making a coherent argument, but raising a topic or continuing a discussion. In itself a blog post can seem lightweight and frivolous, obsessed with some minutiae and addressing a niche audience, which is possibly why professional writers can sometimes be a little dismissive. And rightly so. Blogging, as I’m defining it, is quite terrible at the sort of things academics and journalists do. But it’s also quite wonderful at things they don’t do.
Blogging is part of what’s become known as The Social Internet, which essentially boils down to people talking about stuff. Stuff is a very powerful currency online and takes all sorts of shapes. Facebook is a good model of how this works. A blogger once described Facebook as a really fancy bookshelf where you put things – books you’ve read, movies you like, photos you’ve taken, diary entries you’ve written, events you’re attending and links to cool stuff so you can show them off to visitors.
And then magic happens as Facebook takes your stuff and throws it into your network of friends. Suddenly these things are no longer dumb objects, but the foundations on which social interaction can take place. More critically this stuff generates more stuff. A photo from a party will spawn a conversation about the party, which in turn encourages others to post photos of the party. During these conversations the next party is planned, which spawns more photos and more conversations.
And that’s just a simple linear example. If you’re using Facebook have a look at how you use it. Look at how it maps the connections between people based on the things they do on there. Now apply this to the whole Internet and you’ll start to get an idea of where I’m coming from.
