That’s a bit of a misleading title actually. What I should have said is ‘the point of this blog’. I had to face up to that a bit in redesigning it, and it got me thinking about all the different reasons for having the site in the first place, and how I got here.
My blogging history is pretty much LiveJournal… Vox… (brief foray into Blogger)… here. My LJ was locked, my Vox was not under my real name but I gradually put real photos on it. And then I started working in this field and thought it would be a good idea to have an online home for me.
Of course there are downsides to that. When I had a blog not in my name, I could blog about family and friends without making their identity public (to this day if I’m going to say anything really personal about someone on Twitter I’ll do it by DM. It’s not fair otherwise- it’s my public profile, not theirs). I wrote about my pregnancy before I told work, which was a wonderful outlet. I could be, I think, a little more honest and transparent, as we all are under a film of anonymity.
But I also couldn’t easily talk about my work, and was always second-guessing how much I could say about myself.
Part of the reason for creating this site was essentially to have something that could serve as an online CV. It’s good to have a place to collect achievements and things I’ve been involved with. Every so often I update my real CV without doing anything with it, just to give myself a sense of what I’ve learned and where I’m going and I often come back here to remind myself!
That’s why I couldn’t call this a blog about anything in particular. I talk about social media because they’re the basis of my job and a major interest. I talk about babies and parenting because that’s my life at the moment. I talk about Disney and cakes and books and feminism and cats because I want to.
I used to think that maybe that was a weakness of this blog, and I think it put me off updating it sometimes. I’ve got so used to the pro-blogging world that I felt like this blog ought to have a niche area of interest and stick to it (fairly) rigidly. But of course I’m not trying to make money out this blog. (One could argue that ultimately I’m trying to make money out of me, but I think if you’re considering hiring me for something then it’s okay if you know I have a life outside work. I would have thought that would be a bonus, actually). I’m not trying to appeal to a particular audience. I’m just using this in a simple, cave painting kind of way: to talk, to share, to vent. And, if I’m lucky, and people are interested, to listen, too.
I’ve just gone back to the start, really, and just taken blogging for what it is for most people, most of the time.
But you know if I were ever going to launch myself down the path of pro-blogging for myself, I’d want to keep this bit of Pro Blogger wisdom about not comparing myself to others in mind.
And now maybe I should get on with the actual blogging about stuff other than, erm, blogging.
