Category — Blogiquette or On Blogging

Here’s something I’d like to hear your thoughts on.  A bunch of us were just discussing a specific situation about Facebook communications (someone posted something innocuous on another person’s wall and the wall owner got upset), and we ranged widely in how we handled Facebook communications.

Facebook has multiple options for sending out a message to someone.  You can privately message them, which is akin to sending an email, or you can post directly on their wall if they’ve left that option open.

So let’s start with your personal rule for how you decide which form of communication you use.  There are obvious examples — if it could be potentially embarrassing or controversial, then hose clearly would benefit from the private nature of messaging.  But what about other stuff?  How do you determine what you put on someone’s wall and what you keep private?

For instance, if you just got dinner with someone, would you privately message how much fun you had or would you post that on their wall?  What about if they recommended a restaurant to you while you were standing around the water cooler at work (do people actually do that?); would you post on their Facebook wall how much you loved it if you then went to that restaurant or would you privately message your thanks for the recommendation?

The second question is whether you always respond in the same manner in which you were contacted.  If someone privately messages you, would you ever send your response by posting on their wall?  If someone posts on your wall, do you take the conversation off-the-wall and move to private messaging?  What if the topic at hand was something as innocuous as what you’re making for dinner that night?  If the person asked for a recipe via private message, would it be okay to find the recipe and then post it on their wall?

Lastly, most of us have had to remove a wall post at one point or another because while someone else was comfortable with their comment being public, the owner of the wall was not.  So the third question is do you tell the person why you’ve removed their wall update, or do you simply remove and move on without commentary?

So how do you navigate Facebook communication?

One of my favourite bloggers had to close her blog.  She admitted, as many do, that she wasn’t even sure what her blog should be or where it even was, calling her exploration of social media and the way it changes constantly as feeling like “an old dog wrestling with a new trick.”

Blogging both feels as if it plods along, always the same if you’re eyeore-ish about it, as I seem to be.  You will still find me here, years from now, with (most likely) the same layout and the same type of content.  I have not Pinterestized my blog and I don’t vlog and I don’t have a lot of fancy schmancy plugins like a good blogger should.

This space is just an audition room for my words and ideas.

I don’t think any of us truly know the dimensions of our blog.  We don’t know where our blog ends and the audience begins.  We don’t know where we end and our blog begins.  We have no sense of the depth of our ideas or the reach of our words.  If you think about it too much, it’s like jumping into a sink hole without any knowledge of when your foot will touch bottom; a scary concept.  But just because we can’t touch all the walls to be sure of its form doesn’t mean that we can’t understand aspects about the shape of the space.  My blog is a harbour, it’s a refuge, it’s a dumping ground, it’s an information gatherer.

And mostly, it is, as I’ve already said, an audition space for my words and ideas, a place to try them out before I state them elsewhere, if at all.  Things you read here end up later in books, usually in an altered yet similar form.  If you squint at paragraphs, you can see places where Rachel Goldman is taking thoughts from my blog.  I try them out here with you so I can understand them better myself.  I take these ideas out of my head, place them on the screen, and after we speak about them, I place them back into my head, slightly changed.

I don’t usually convey ideas well when I’m speaking aloud.  This is the place where I can explain myself, where I can build myself out of words.  I feel confident here, and we all need a place where we feel confident because everyone struggles with some aspect of their world whether it’s their workplace relationships or their marriage or their friendships.  Everyone needs a place that they can come to and feel understood.  For others, that place is the yoga studio or a conference room or a local store.  For me, it’s this blog.

I’m sad this writer is losing her space, even if she didn’t fully know her space, because I get a sense that she loved it even if she didn’t understand her blog at times.  And because, selfishly, I loved getting a chance to see her words.  I hope I get a chance one day to read them again.

Yesterday ended my Internet diet.  It was definitely a diet: non-sustainable but quick results.  Like the Grapefruit Diet, except with considerably less grapefruit.

Perhaps because I’ve been thinking about how I changed the way I eat, I could see all the similarities between my relationship with food (unhealthy) and my relationship with the Internet (unhealthy).  Yet, with one of those unhealthy habits, I changed my relationship into something that is healthy, reasonable and… just to repeat the word again… sustainable.  That seems to be the key here.  I didn’t change my relationship with the Internet into something sensibly proportioned with my life.  I went on what amounted to an Internet fast, and now the fast is over and I’ve reverted — within MINUTES — back to my unhealthy ways which leads to my “ill” feelings (you know, in the same way that I felt like crap physically due to what I ate prior to changing my eating habits).

I knew my Internet diet wasn’t realistic due to the enormous amount of work that went into the ability to go on an Internet fast.  I had to do all the work I would normally do during that time period.  In the interest of full disclosure, there were about three days when I tacked on an extra 10 minutes to my allotted 30 minutes because I had to deal with something work-related.  I didn’t want to give up my personal 30 minutes, and I reasoned that work has to come before diets.  I was fairly miserable working ahead in order to go on my Internet fast.  I used the computer double the amount I would normally do since I was doing my normal workload plus my future workload.  There were a few days when I didn’t get dressed.  I just sat in front of the computer and typed and typed and typed.

My blog was the easiest element to deal with during my Internet diet.  I write double what I post, so I just unleashed a few posts that had been sitting in the draft folder, ready to go.  It meant that I wasn’t creating commentary on anything in real time, but that’s fine.  Not every post needs to reflect the present moment.  Yet I felt oddly detached from this space because I had written the posts and set them to run and then didn’t really go back into my blog except for the times when I uploaded people to the IComLeavWe list.  I wrote every day, though I did so longhand.  Which felt honestly like a pain-in-the-ass since I’m accustomed to the speed to typing.  But I knew that if I allowed myself to type, I would find a reason to look up “just one thing.”  So I didn’t allow myself to type.  And it felt weird.

The hardest thing — and the place where I perhaps learned the most about myself — was with reading blogs.  I didn’t leave as many comments as I would have liked, and that made me feel like crap.  Not leaving comments made me anxious.  I also ended up not reading any feeds in my Reader that didn’t belong to a personal blog.  I have a tendency to read like I eat: candy first, protein second.  But during my diet, I got rid of ALL the candy: Jezebel, Gawker, Lifehacker, Slate, Mashable, HuffingtonPost.  I just hit “mark all as read” every day, and then dove into the heart of my Reader, which are all personal blogs.  When you only have 20 minutes to read blogs because you used up 10 minutes reading emails, you want the best.  You want the protein that is going to stick with you until you get your next online meal.

30 minutes goes awfully quick.

I started my diet on a weekend, which is a time when I’m usually online less than a weekday, so it felt like a good starting point.  It wasn’t hard to fill the time with other things: craft projects (um… more like futilely going to stores to collect supplies for said project and finding that they don’t carry what I want and then changing my mind several thousand times… it’s a long story), reading books, chillaxing with the kids.  It was Succot, so we celebrated Succot.  Actually, the biggest thing I did with my new-found time was read.  I mean, I chillax with the kids during a normal week.  But reading books always falls by the wayside.  I read pages here and there, but I rarely have the time to sit down after the kids are in bed and read for hours.  But that’s what I did — I read for hours.   And I loved it.  I forgot how relaxed I feel after being in a story or a structured piece of non-fiction, a peace I don’t find as I jump from blog to blog.

Perhaps that is because when you read blogs, you are jumping from writing style to writing style, topic to topic.  I feel the same way about magazines; I don’t walk away from reading magazines feeling relaxed.  I walk away feeling as if my mind is buzzing.  And that’s how I feel when I leave blog reading.  Blogs make me think and they make me want to write, but they don’t really allow me to enter that deep state of imagination or consideration that can be found in books.

I can’t say the diet was impossibly hard or that I wanted to gnaw off my own hand as I went through Internet withdrawal.  There were times when I was itching to go online and see if a post received any comments or if someone had emailed back, but for the most part, I was able to put the Internet out of my mind when it wasn’t my allotted half hour.

And then Simchat Torah ended (the last day after Succot) and I lifted my Internet ban, allowing myself to fall back into normal usage.  The story we all kid ourselves with when we do any sort of diet is that we’ll be able to sustain the results; they’ll jump start a new habit.  But that’s not what happened at all.  The moment I allowed myself open usage of the Internet, I felt my familiar online-induced anxiety.  The pile of emails needed responses.  There were blog posts I wanted to return to comment on that were screaming for my attention now, now, now.  People had made various requests for my time during the fast that I felt fine putting off under the excuse that I was on an Internet diet.  But now I had to deal with all those requests.  Even though they’d take hours to fulfill, I felt like they were all sitting on my chest, having to deal with their full weight all at once.

Within minutes, I felt stretched thin.  The soup I wanted to make didn’t get done.

My inbox felt cluttered, and that in turn affected my train of thoughts.

All within one evening of normal Internet usage.

I’m not sure what the answer is.  I already limit my Internet usage in many ways including not being online for the most part when the twins are at home and awake.  I could say no to more things, but I think we all know that isn’t very realistic.  I mean, yes, I can say no, but it would mean not paying forward what others have done for me, and that doesn’t sound like a very enticing way to live.  Being a dick is easy; finding balance between doing things for others while still finding time for myself is much harder.

I think that in a few more days, everything will shake out and return to normal.  I’m in that place now where I’ve been Internet starving so now I’m over-consuming.  And soon I will return to my normal state of Internet-induced guilt about non-returned emails or comments not left, and also find time to finish Rowling’s new book.  I hope.

Even though it totally didn’t work as a sustainable solution, since we have another 8-day holiday in the spring (Pesach), I think I’m going to repeat this experiment again.  Even if I know it doesn’t bring long term results.  Just because.

What if a horrible virus was sweeping across the Internet, pulling apart the emulsion of comments and blog content and deleting one entirely.  Entirely means entirely; there are no loop holes to this what if: any cut-and-paste jobs, Google Reader stars, any emailed version of comments or posts — all of them gone when they disappear from the url.  But this virus is also merciful (perhaps invented by a white hat hacker) and gives you ten seconds to choose one or the other.

Which will you save: all of your comments, which obviously speak about the post and may even contain a quote or two, but you’ll be left without any of your content OR all of your blog posts, which obviously record your life, but you’ll be left without any reminders of the support or advice you received.

Which are you saving: comments or blog posts?

Sitting on stage, in four-inch orange platform sandals, Martha Stewart expounded on what makes for a successful blog: personal, openness, passionate, sharing.  She spun off on the idea of monetization, of placing a value on your blogging effort, but my mind kept shuffling through the writing side of her advice.

It needs to be personal, showing the personality of the author.  It needs to have openness, giving part of yourself to the reader.  It needs to be passionate, making the reader care as much as you care.  And it needs to be sharing, you need to convey something or what was the point in spending time in the space?

It seemed like such a simplistic – and true – equation for creating a successful blog; a formula for how to create a successful blog.

If you scale each trait from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most and 1 being the least, how does your blog add up?

Personal: how much of your personality shines through?  Have you created an alter-ego online who doesn’t mesh with who you are offline?  Can people define your bloggy voice?  Give yourself 1 – 5 points for how well you’re doing this.

Openness: how open are you with readers?  Do you hold a lot back?  Do you feel like you have an arm up, holding curious people at bay?  Give yourself 1 – 5 points for how well you’re doing this.

Passionate: how excited are you about your own life?  If you’re not living the life you want to live, can you write an exciting blog?  Is a lack of energy in living life seeping into your words?  This is not just about happiness; are you passionately conveying what is in your head?  Give yourself 1 – 5 points for how well you’re doing this.

Sharing: are you conveying something?  Are you conveying new things?  Do you keep rehashing the same thoughts?  Can you think of things that people learned at your site that they couldn’t learn elsewhere, even if it was just something about what is important to you?  Give yourself 1 – 5 points for how well you’re doing this.

Be honest – how did your blog score AND can you now see places where you could improve and change your blog’s fate?