social interaction

This post is the last in a series. Read the first installment.

Words: Pete Ashton
Illustration: Raymond Weekes

Okay, I’ve rambled and covered a hell of a lot of ground. To be honest it’s hard to give a proper masterclass or How To for blogging because the beauty of the form is there are no rules. I know what works for me but it’s unlikely to work for you and some of the best blogs I’ve seen have been approaching the medium in ways I hadn’t ever considered before. You should use blogging (and other similar web services like Flickr and Last.FM) in the same way you use other forms of communication like the telephone or your local pub - in ways that work for you and the community you’re part of.

And while this might be scary be assured that underlying it all is the magic that makes the internet work, the reason that you can find stuff on Google, how an American became a fan of you band on MySpace or how you got that commission because someone blogged a photo of your work with a link to your site.

Blogging might be as easy as writing an email but its the structured metadata that takes your message and makes available to the right people across the world. And the beauty of it all is you don’t have to think about it, unless you want to (and it’s not that hard really - hell, I can’t write programming code and I get it). You just need to go to wordpress.com (4talentmagazine.com is built with Wordpress), blogger.com, typepad.com or some other blogging service and get posting and linking. The internet looks after the rest.

< Week 7: plugging into the system

< Read the series from the start

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.

< Week 1: blogging vs. print

Next in the series: everything is intertwingled >