Ordinary Gweilo

Before I started this blog, I had a few nagging doubts

1. Would I be able to find anything to write about?
2. Would anyone read it?
3. How much of my time would it take up?

Finding things to write about is actually the least of my worries, and in fact I have a backlog of ideas, whilst every day others blogs and bits and pieces I find on the Internet provide more inspiration. The second point was a bit of a worry at the beginning, but as more bloggers provide links, the number of people reading the site increases (and I get more comments). The last of the three is perhaps the biggest worry, and I really need to spend a bit less time on this.

One of the things I didn’t do before I started was to find out what one is supposed to put in a blog or what is frowed upon. Actually, one thing I expected was to get a few comments when I did things ‘wrong’, but so far there has been nothing! So it’s interesting to read someone elses’s ideas on the Cardinal Sins of Blogging [via Shaky].

Rather surprisingly, I don’t think I am breaking any of these rules. Some of my short posts didn’t have titles, but I noticed that it was causing problems for Shri at Geoblogs so I stopped doing that. However, I’d still like to stop the title appearing here for short posts, but Typepad doesn’t currently support it.

Of course, one of the biggest “problems” is that blogging covers a multitude of sins. Some are very serious, some are fictional, some are nothing more personal journals, others are anything but, and that makes it difficult to have any standards about what is good or bad. Which is perhaps a good thing, since blogs are very individual (and it would be boring if they were all the same). I found this quote from author Susan Hill in Saturday’s Guardian newspaper, which probably reflects the most common view of blogs:

Does anyone now keep a diary? Of course they do. Thousands of people. They just call them blogs and put them up on the web instead of down on paper. But let blogs be a treat for another day

She also mentions one of the cleverest ideas for a blog – The Diary of Samuel Pepys with new entries added one day at a time. This allows readers to add comments and explanations.