I’ve been blogging in a public forum for four years. On my personal blog, I have over 600 posts. In all that time, I’ve been asked to edit or remove a blog post a total of two times.
That equals two extra times in my life that I’ve been irritated by my blog. Unnecessarily.
The first incident came in the form of a post I’d written about an old acquaintance who had made an enormous life decision that was very much out of the ordinary. I was inspired to write about it, and I did so without naming names, or outing the subject in any way. I did send a link to the person, who proceeded to comment on the post, using her name.
Later, the person decided that being so “out” was generating criticism and since her story had become somewhat viral, she became uncomfortable.
At first, she simply requested that I remove her name from the comment she’d left, but as we know, Google doesn’t forget. It wasn’t long before I was asked to remove the post. I did it after some thought, but only because the benefit to taking it down for her far outweighed the benefit I reaped by keeping it up.
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Last month, retail behemoth J.C. Penney got nailed by Google for using black hat SEO tactics and was subsequently penalized for the under-handed methods in search. In other words, they were seriously busted.
But J.C. Penney is hardly alone in their foray into attempting to cheat the web.
The latest comes in the form of CSN Stores, an online conglomerate of 250 different shopping sites with individual names, and they are up to the same type of practice, only they are involving bloggers.
Last May, a member of the promotions team at CSN Stores contacted me to determine my interest in working with them to generate awareness for their stores. At the time, they were offering a $50 gift card to use on any of their hundreds of webstores in exchange for a blog review. I was swamped, and couldn’t find time to work the opportunity into my calendar.
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We all know the type – a blogger who sits perched behind her desk all day blogging, tweeting, Facebook’ing like crazy. Telling all and leaving nothing out. Chances are, if you met her, she would be a laugh a minute, the life of the party, and your new BFF.
Or, maybe not.
Bloggers, securely fastened behind their computer screens, are very courageous people. But get them in public, and you may find that they’re not as outgoing as they seem.
Or maybe they are. But until you meet, how will you know?
The scene is familiar - at every blogger event, someone feels let down by the characters in the room. It’s happened to me. And I’m sure it’s happened to you.
But the truth is, with all the finger-pointing and “this group is so cliquey” and “who does she think she is” going on, are we really doing our part to control our experience? Or are we making our good time someone else’s problem?
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In last week’s post, titled Bloggers, somebody loves us!, I mentioned Kari Henley’s piece in the HuffPo, her impression of bloggers, and just how wonderful she thinks we are. In it, she mentioned how “bloggers are more than willing to share what they know and hook you up.” In other words, what she saw was a community who helps and supports one another.
Having been immersed in the mom blogging community for over four years, my own personal sentiments on this topic tend to be slightly more cynical. But I thought to myself that maybe Henley was seeing it with fresh eyes. Maybe I was missing something. Maybe I needed to refresh my perspective. Maybe bloggers are more generous than I thought.
It was all hearts and rainbows and unicorns. At least for a minute or two.
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In a recent post on the New York Times Motherlode blog, Lisa Belkin ponders whether Mom bloggers are jinxed, since it seems every day there is another mom blogger facing disaster.
The disasters, I assure you, are real. But is this the question?
I mean, come on. Everyone, at some point, faces adversity. Every person - no matter how rich, how gorgeous, how lucky, finds themselves face-to-face with a struggle. Whether it materializes as a health issue, a death, infertility, or divorce, no person on this earth ever gets away scot-free.
But bloggers are blabbers. They have a platform to publicize their most private moments - and readers eat it up.
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Four years ago I came upon this advice:
If you have a website (like a blog) that you claim copyright for, and the information on that website is updated regularly, then as soon as a change is made on that website, you should update the copyright statement for the new year.
I've proactively updated all my blogs copyrights every January 1st figuring that it couldn't hurt.
What, you don’t have a copyright on your blog? Just add one at the bottom - Copyright © 2006-2011 by My Cool Blog. All rights reserved - or something to that effect. (Remember, I’m not a lawyer and I don’t play on on the interwebs.) While it doesn’t protect you from the jerks who scrape your content, it does make your blog look a teeny bit more professional.
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People are super curious about bloggers. I'm constantly being asked things like, why did you start your blog? How do you keep up with it? OMG, you got that for free??
I never really thought about it, but blogging is new to most people and below are some of the thoughts I've come up with in thinking about these questions. I've been a blogger for, oh, three-and-a-half years now. But I've been a writer all my life and these days, and there doesn't seem to be a big difference.
Except there is.
My blog has become an extension of me. It has taken on a life of its own and has grown into an entity that I could have never imagined. Unlike the newer bloggers who design their blogs with a goal of product reviews or junket jumping, when I started writing The Daily Grind in May of 2007, I had one goal in mind - to write.
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If you asked a room full of bloggers what bloggy challenge they come up against fairly often, I think finding time to write would be somewhere at the top of that list. I know for me, time is my prime challenge. In the beginning, there used to be days when inspiration was an issue for me, but with everything happening both in the world and in my life, all the products that need reviewing and so on, inspiration is abundant.
Time, however, is not.
Like most of you, I have a full plate. A typical day in my life consists of getting two kids to school by 8:30 am, myself to work by 9 am, getting said kids fed, bathed, and entertained, not to mention quality cuddle time and everything that goes into that. Oh, and until a self-cleaning house is invented, that, along with groceries once or twice a week, I'm kept busy.
And then there's the other half of my responsibilities.
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Last week, Darren Rowse of Problogger.net and Chris Garrett of chrisg.com announced the release of the second edition of the book they wrote together a few years back - ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. (They refer to it as “ProBlogger the Book,” which makes me wonder if “Problogger the Musical” is in the works.)
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