Entry #11 | Blog Retrospect

Hello, once again! Here we are now, more than ten blog posts in to this somewhat experimental blogging process for me.  It seems like a good opportunity share some learned insights thus far and as well as a couple of retrospective musings. Starting off, I think the best advice I can give it to make use of the draft function. I definitely found myself creating drafts of topics to blog about, which provided a location to start accumulating ideas and various articles and/or research. This entails a process that is multi-day since the development of the topic rarely happened for me in one session at the computer. I preferred to think about what I wanted to say over the course of a few days. There were also topics that I ended up deleting for a variety of reasons such as lack of information or just finding a better topic. Not all things are meant to be, right?

Another item to consider is the use of images. There are a significant amount of images out there on the Internet and one of the things to remember is that many are protected by copyright. As a student, there are usually allowances for the use of images and/or material since it is for an educational purpose but any serious blogging will probably require more strict adherence. I have found freedigitalphotos.net to be a great source for images that are available for non-commercial use. Google can also be utilized but after you click on the Images link, you will then need to click on the Tools button, which will display another menu below the initial menu. On the Tools menu bar, click on Usage rights and select the appropriate category for which you are searching. Generally speaking, I think Labeled for reuse is acceptable for blogging.

 An interesting resource to keep in mind is your fellow bloggers; check out their blogs and see what they are discussing. There may be a conversation already in progress that you may want to join in order to try to include a different perspective for their consideration. This can lead to community development as well as provide people with ideas from which to further develop more ideas and/or discussions. This can provide ideas for different topics that you would like to discuss in addition to any discussions you may find. This process may be asymmetrical but it can provide a lot of benefit to everyone involved. You can definitely learn more about people from personal blogs and participating in discussions with either your own blogs or in their comments, just remember to keep it civil and don't be an Internet troll.

In retrospect though, this has been an interesting endeavor that has provided an opportunity to learn more about publishing content in a more personal styled voice. The personal styled voice is interesting to think about because I think that we do not really have much of that any longer in our public space. Any correspondence at work is expected to be professional and relatively impersonal. For anyone in college, most of the written work is academic with development focused on more academic and/or professional styled writing...which is again predominantly impersonal. Emailing can be more personal but how often do you use it for that purpose? It is rare that I send a personal email to anyone. Phone calls and texting is much more common for me as a means to communicate with family and friends. Texting is personal, but it is not usually a cohesively written response since it tends to be more acronyms and abbreviations to convey the message via a learned code that is understood between the two people.

Another thing to consider during this moment of retrospective wandering, is the opportunity to learn about what your fellow bloggers are writing about currently. There are so many topics to write about today. Many times there are situational obstacles that would prevent you from ever trying to learn enough about a topic to feel like you could write with some amount of authority on the topic. However, people have many different experiences and it can be exciting to find a topic or story that someone shares that excites your imagination and sparks a creative moment for you. Make some time to read what your peers find interesting to write about because if they are writing then there is a purpose to it.

With all that though, it is time to wrap this up once again. Writing a blog has provided some interesting opportunities to explore some different topics a bit more informally as well as learning more from, and about, some of my fellow bloggers. We will have to see what the future holds for blogs in 2018 but until that time...Happy Holidays! Take care and best wishes, everyone!