My original reason for starting my old blog was to keep in touch with
my family and friends, and to perhaps make some new friends (or find a
boyfriend) who shared my interests. Over time, I expanded my blog's
purpose to include networking with economics professors and students,
writing about my politics and activism, and making money from ads.
Then I got too busy with my real life and shut it down for a while,
until I had free time again and restarted it because I was bored and
lonely.
I've been blogging on this second incarnation for almost three
months now, but I've begun to doubt whether my new blog in its current
format is still effectively serving my needs:
1. Keep in touch
with family and friends: It seems to work pretty well for this
purpose. I suck at keeping up with one-on-one pen-pal relationships,
so being
able to post all my stuff in one place where people I know can read or
not
read it as their time and interest permit, then comment or email me
their responses and personal news when they want, works much better for
me. Most of the people I know IRL read my blog at least occasionally.
Also, I frequently hear from distant relatives and old
friends/acquaintances about how much they enjoyed browsing my archives
after they Googled their way here, so having a public internet presence
is helpful.
The
drawback, though, is anyone -- including stalkers and creepy strangers
-- can read what I post here, so I have to censor myself much more than
I would if I was writing only to people I know. My husband doesn't
want me posting pictures of him because he doesn't want weirdos
stalking him in the poker room and/or outing him as a professional
gambler to the fish. My more privacy-oriented friends and family
members don't want me to blog about them at all. I often start to
write about my plans then delete it when I realize that I'm giving out
too many details about where I'm going to be when (I've had some bad
experiences with creepy men showing up places to pester me after
finding out where I was going to be from my blog).
2.
Make new friends: I have made many "friends" through blogging.
However, I am not sure that these are the best type of "friends" for me
to be making.
Over the past few years my social life has
become unbalanced in favor of online "friendships". The primary reason
for this shift was that all the moving around I've done (Seattle to
Bellingham to Costa Rica to Vancouver to Las
Vegas to the Seattle to Las Vegas in the two-year period of
January 2005 to January 2007) made it difficult for me to establish and
maintain real-life friendships. Why bother if you're just going to
move again soon?
My
online friends were my only social constant for most of that period.
In some ways, it was great. Whenever I was feeling lonely in a new
town, it was comforting to know that Phil, Scorpius, Wayne, Andrew,
Shawn, Bill, etc. were just an RSS feed update away from virtually
hanging out with me chatting about Battlestar Galactica or whatever.
On the other hand, being able to easily assuage my loneliness online
has reduced my incentive to ever leave the house.
Also, I've
noticed that a hugely disproportionate number of my blog "friends" are
single heterosexual males (SHMs). Perhaps this is just an innocent
correlation due to a combination of my primarily "male" interests and
the additional free time that singles have available to spend
socializing online. But I suspect that in many cases it's because
their interest is more than friendly. This was flattering when I was
single, but now that I'm married I'd prefer that my friends not
fantasize about having sex with me.
I realize that sexual attraction is not every SHMs motivation for
befriending me (so no need to leave ego-deflating comments about how
much you *don't* want to have sex with me, thanks :) ) but it's the
motivation of *enough* SHMs that it makes me suspicious of all of
them. Especially since I am apparently not very good at reading people
in this area -- I've been surprised by how many of my SHM "friends"
suddenly stopped speaking to me after I got married. (Many of these
former "friends" also used to pretend that their interest was only
"friendly" when I was single, so I've stopped believing SHMs about
their true motivations for friendships with women.)
I like and want to keep most of my current friends, but I don't want to make any new long-distance or SHM
friends
until I've balanced out my social life with other types of friends.
Since my blog seems to primarily attract long-distance SHMs it no
longer fits my friendship needs/goals.
3. Find a boyfriend: Well, I got married -- unrelated to blogging -- so that's not a need any more.
4.
Networking: My blog has actually been quite effective for this. I got
my last job (in less than 24 hours!) because of my blog. Also, when I
was still thinking about graduate school in economics, I made contacts
and found out about programs that I wouldn't have otherwise made or
found out about. I've been approached for other jobs and freelance
gigs (that I decided not to pursue) as the result of my blog as well.
So I think that in general, a blog is a good way to network. However,
I strongly suspect that an ungated mixed diary/political/hobbies and
interests blog is not the most effective way to network professionally.
5.
Write about politics and activism: Having my own blog for this made
sense when I was a candidate for office. However, I don't plan on
doing that again, nor do I plan on blogging about politics frequently
enough to build up a sizable audience interested in reading about it.
If I want my political posts to actually influence anything, I think I
would be a lot more effective as an occasional contributor to a more
popular frequently-updated politically-focused group blog. So I might
take ElfNinos Mom up on her invitation to write for Last Free Voice when I have something political to say.
6.
Make some money: I made a surprising amount of money with my old blog
until the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act killed 95% of my
income and forced me to get a job. :( Not all of my blog revenue was
from internet gambling ads, though -- some of it was from Google and
Amazon as well.
Since then, I've spent a lot of time pondering
what did and didn't work for making money on my old blog, as well as
researching how others have made money online, and I think I could be
successful at it again. I considered putting ads on this blog, but
just like with networking, I'm pretty sure that a mixed
diary/political/hobbies and interests blog is not the most effective
way to make money online.
...
So. Writing through the above, it doesn't seem like
this blog, in its current form, is effectively meeting my needs or
furthering my goals anymore. What, if anything, would work better?
I
enjoy blogging about my life and want to continue, but I've decided
that want to restrict the audience to only people I know in real life
and my closest online friends. So I'm exploring social networking
sites that would allow me to do that.
I don't like MySpace -- it's ugly, full of the wrong kind of people,
and has a confusing interface (I still haven't figured out how to
configure it to prevent strange men, spammers, and bands from
approaching me yet still allow real friends to find me).
Facebook appeals to me because the privacy settings are pretty
configurable. I can decide what kind of information each class of
people -- friends, friends of friends, my "networks" (UNLV and Las
Vegas), or the general public -- gets to see. It's also already
relatively widely used, has a lot of neat features, and is a hell of a
lot classier than MySpace. I like the school- and local-oriented networking features. Although it's more of a social networking site than a blogging platform, there are blogging plug-ins, so I think I could do almost everything there I can do now, maybe more. However, I wish that I could customize the privacy levels more --
either with custom-made groups, or even on the individual level --
instead of just having one big group of "friends" with equal access to
my friends-only content.
LiveJournal is another option. I haven't experimented with it much,
but I've gathered that you can set up different "friends filters" to
manage who gets to see which posts, which makes the privacy settings
much more configurable than Facebook. It's just a blogging platform,
though, and there isn't a way tostore non-post profile information privately like in Facebook.
Any other ideas? I don't know much about the social networking sites,
is there something out there as fully-featured as Facebook, but with
more customizable privacy settings? I'd prefer to go with something
that is widely used, so as to increase the likeliness that friends and
family already use it or would have more use for it than just reading
my blog. I'm also interested in suggestions for sites that are more
professional networking-oriented -- I might create profiles on
different sites for different purposes.
Also, if you are a friend or family member, please let me know which social networking service(s) you already use.
if
you want an invitation to Facebook. If you already have a Facebook
profile, please email me your Facebook name and email address so I can
find you and add you.