From Blogs to Blockbusters

On Wednesday, MaryBeth, Angel, Nayanny, Michelle and I went up to the JCC for the “From Blogs to Blockbusters” event, which consisted of a conversation between Julie Powell and Gretchen Rubin, moderated by Abigail Pobgrebin.  Julie’s first blog, The Julie/Julia Project, got her a book deal and then a movie spin-off (Julie and Julia); she has a new blog and a new book, Cleaving, which she was promoting at the event.  Gretchen started a blog while she was working on her latest book, The Happiness Project – unlike Julie, she first started a book and then (because she was testing the idea that doing something that scares and challenges you will make you happier) she started a blog.

I’m not sure how interested the Jbloggers were in the digressions on marriage and discussions toward the end of the night, but the responses to the early questions about blogging were interesting to me, especially because (as you all know) I’ve been thinking A LOT about blogging lately – who reads them, what are they for, why do people write them, why do people read them, etc?  So here’s a breakdown of some of what I was able to take away from the talk:

(1) Blogs work well when they are inspirational, and have a framework that other people can follow.  Gretchen talked a lot about this regarding her project, which has inspired people to try their own happiness projects.

(2) Both insisted that blogging is easier if you build it into your routine, and try to write everyday (obviously I haven’t mastered this, as I am responding to the event two days after it happened!).  They both seemed to enjoy the self-discipline that blogging forced them to achieve.

(3) I was surprised that they both said they spent a lot of time making sure that they “wrote well” (or maybe I was just surprised that they admitted to self-editing and keeping posts for days trying to get them right).  I think this says a lot about the purpose of their blogs, as well as the audience — Gretchen makes a living writing and realizes that wherever she writes she better think about how she does it, since her product is part of her livelihood.  Likewise, although Julie kept insisting that she had no idea that she would ever get a book deal from blogging (and it’s true that in 2002 this was much rarer than it is today), she was also trying to make it as a writer somehow and must have realized in some way that the style was an important as the content.  Likewise, for people to want to follow a blog, I think it does have to be written well, although this designation is, of course, somewhat subjective.

(4) Both bloggers emphasized that the subject of the blog is THE most important reason that people come back and read it, and I don’t think they were just being modest.  They both said that the subject has to be “bloggable” – which kind of goes back to what they were saying about it being inspirational.  Gretchen also discussed the informative content of her blog – people seem to want information about happiness.  I was interested in this notion of “bloggability” because that’s really what we have been discussing with the various Jblogger sites and their themes.

(5) They spoke about the issue of Too Much Information (TMI) and the fact that blogs are feeding the appetite for candor, honesty, and personal details.  I was fascinated by the fact that Gretchen did not use proper names (for example, of her family) when she blogged about them, but she does use their names in the book version.  She admitted that this was illogical and she didn’t really know why she did it, but I think it might have to do with “google-ability” and the access that googling provides to almost anyone.  To see your name in a book, someone has to buy it and read it (or at least flip through it pretty carefully) – to see your name on the web they just have to google you, and not only will they see that you are on a blog, they will see exactly what it says about you, in approximately .0345 seconds.  What’s worse: being slammed on the web or in a tell-all book? (Gretchen wasn’t slamming anyone, by the way, her observation just got me thinking.)

Overall, I’m glad we went – it answered some of my questions about blogging and brought up some more (and the free food spread at the end was pretty fantastic!).  What do you all think about some of the questions and issues that came up, whether you were there or not?  (Also, I’d love to hear you weigh in on which would be worse – being written about online or in a book.)

Who reads my blog, anyway?

This is a very interesting blog post about digital ethics and privacy issues – thanks, Kate, for sending it to me.  It’s from a college class blog, so not every issue is the same as the ones we come up against but it brings up some ideas to think about.  I especially want to emphasize the idea that once something is on the internet it is probably always accessible to some extent, so you really want to think through what you share.  As the title of my post suggests, right now maybe no one reads our blogs, but you never know what might happen in the future.  I think it is important to be honest and authentic when writing on your blog, but also be careful to think about how you would feel if all the different people in your life read it.  Ask yourself how would I feel if my mom, my best friend, my little sister, my professor, my future boss, etc., somehow found this blog, and if you are uncomfortable with the idea of those eyes seeing your blog then I wouldn’t post it.

What do you all think about pictures?  As you know I have been encouraging you to create gravatars of yourselves, and I have a picture of myself as mine.  The aforementioned blog post emphatically argues against the students in the class using pictures.  I’m not sure I agree, although I am interested in the question of privacy and the way in which we represent ourselves on the internet (some of you may be surprised to find out I don’t even have a facebook page).  I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Privacy Settings

I have had different conversations with lots of people about the privacy settings offered on wordpress blogs.  Here’s a summary of some of the issues. It is easy to block search engines, meaning that they will not pop up in searches on wordpress.com or google (this is in the settings tab on my dashboard – I believe all of our blogs are set up like this currently, but you can easily check).  However, if someone has the url, they can still see everything that happens on the blog (they are considered “normal visitors” and it is standard to allow them on any blog).  If you want to keep what is happening on the blog private, you have some options:

When you post, you can choose to make that specific page password protected, which means you would have to get in touch with the blog’s users and tell them what the password is.  One easy way to do this would be to always use the same password (like your last name) and that way your habitual readers would know the password.  However, as you can imagine, this could get complicated if people forget the password, especially if you are dealing with deadlines for students.

You can also choose to make a specific page private when you post, which means that only editors and administrators can access that post.  This will not work for course blogs where students are only allowed “author” access to the blog.

Click here for the wordpress help page that explains this in more detail.

You can also make the entire blog private (through the settings tab in my dashboard), which means that you can identify users that you would like to have access, and no one else can even see the blog (when they type in the url, it will prompt them to have to sign in).  The problem here is that you can only do this for 35 users for free – it costs about $30 to add unlimited private users to a blog.

Click here for the wordpress help page that explains this in more detail.