Seduced by Blogging.......

Blogging is BIG!  Its hard to miss this fact.  There are blogs on the New York Times (politics), blogs on Eventing Nation (horses), blogs about economics, blogs about cooking , blogs about travel, blogs about ourselves……And more and more of us blog.  Wiki says there were 156 million public blogs as of last February.  And since I started a blog last week, there are at least 156 million and one…..

Wiki also tells us that the first blog was likely written by a Swarthmore College student in 1994………However, in looking for information about when the first blog was actually published, I googled the words “first blog” and identified a large number of sites giving advice to us neophytes about how to write our first blog….Clearly, the number of blogs will continue to grow…..

But blogging will continue to grow…not just because it is so easy and so much fun,,,,but because the whole process is seductive!  Essentially, it is the ultimate in narcissism!  You write about what you want and how you see it.  If you are a liberal you can tout those values,,,,if you are a conservative, you say something else.  If you want to brag about an event or critique another….well, go ahead.  There is no editor or publisher who needs to approve……just write, post to blogger.com and, voila, you are done!

Best of all you don’t need a captive audience,,,,,,there are so many people out there to read your blog: the whole of the internet is your readership………last week, I put my blog about a piece of horseback riding equipment (my air vest) on Twitter and Facebook.  Now, I am not one of those folks with huge connections and have no plan to develop a business or expand a personal reputation.  I have a small number of followers (under 50) on Twitter, and merely 250 friends on FB. Within 24 hours over 30 folks had read my blog……a couple days later a couple of websites linked to my blog as did a couple of other folks on FB.  In the past 24 hours, over 400 people from all over the world have read my blog!!!!  And, now, four days later there have been almost 700 hits…..Wow!  This is the most popular I have felt since high school! I’ve been seduced….and, this second blog is the concrete evidence!!!

Vive le Blog!