Cyberspace & the Blogosphere

This cyberspace place is a funny old world. A month ago I decided to start writing, I’d always fancied having a go at it and finally gave in to the fantasy and gave it a go. I have to say I’m really pleased that I did. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, that I could maybe learn as I went too. I’m not good enough to, or have the slightest idea how to write a book. I’m not interested in anything enough to write about a particular subject in any real depth so what could I do to practice?

Then I found these blogs. Somewhere you could jot down your thoughts in a private manner but let other people critique them almost instantly. At best there is even the dream of making some spare cash from it – actually earning money from your random thoughts. As most Bloggers know the money doesn’t exactly cut it. Brilliant though the idea of selling advertising space on a piece of writing about towing a car may be, the reality is that most people just read the posts and move on. On a blog like mine with a small amount of readers the tiny fraction made from advertising will never even get high enough to merit the mighty Google from getting their cheque book out. Even on much more focussed blogs with readership in the thousands, revenue is still no way near enough to live on. I’m afraid it’s only going to be pocket money apart from the real top of the tree sites.

What has struck me the most on this quest though, has been the fact that I haven’t really been able to hone my skills as a writer, because I’ve been too busy trying to work out cyberspace etiquette. I’ve had some really nice comments about some of my posts which have been great, & I hope to get more. In fact it’s quite hard to get useful feedback; notes that will help locate and improve on a style of writing, and the different hoops in which you need to jump in order to get some are mind blogging. Joining forums, reading article after article on things you have little or no interest in. You bore your friends rigid and struggle hopelessly to learn HTML when all you wanted to do was write stories.

Here I am now ranting about how hard it is to learn the rules of the World Wide Web because instead of doing what I enjoy (writing some light hearted - hopefully funny – piece about the life I see around me) I’ve had another fruitless hour desperately trying to figure out how to get some extra traffic onto my site in the hope that they will :-
A: Like my posts enough to subscribe or follow me and hence come back.
B: Leave a tick in the boxes to let me know if my post was on the right track.
C: Leave a comment – hopefully of praise but at least of useful criticism.
D. Buy something from Amazon!

So I think that is decision made, I’m going to stop putting as much thought into the design of the page. Stop worrying about pasting back-links all over the blogosphere and just write stuff instead.