Photo: Ben Fry
Alternate titles for this post: “Don’t Think. Just Blog.” or “Friends w/ Blogs: Better than Facebook” or “Blogging is the New Resume”
Most of my friends and family still have a hard time visualizing or seeing value in the word “blog.”
To them the term “blog” still means a homely-looking website with sporadic posts about someones cat and what they ate for dinner last night.
By no means do they see blogs as an amazingly powerful way to connect, communicate, learn, research, share etc with interesting people, thoughts, companies, movements etc around the world.
In this post, I will try and share my two cents for why I think blogs are awesome and why everyone, especially my interesting friends, should start blogs.
This post has brewing in my mind for the past few weeks, so bear with me as I ramble through all my points.
Update: Here’s a quick executive summary of my three reasons (Note: I explain them better in the rest of my post):
1) People are interesting
2) They inject life into “stale” connections allowing you to reconnect
3) They allow you to connect, communicate, collaborate, and most importantly, GET A JOB
First reason, people are interesting.
A lot of my friends and family are really interesting. People in general all have interesting perspectives and thoughts. This should be self-explanatory for why its a reason.
Seth Godin, who I think is a brilliant genius and whose blog I read everyday, recently wrote a post saying who cares if you suck at writing… “just say it.”
I couldn’t agree more. My writing skills have always been sub-par, but I don’t care because I think raw content, not style, is what matters most.
Second reason, blogs can inject life into “stale” connections from previous life stages and real world social networks allowing you to reconnect in powerful ways without spending too much time or energy
Andrew Chen, a new face and unconventional, innovative thinker in the social media sphere and whose blog I read whenever he chooses to post, recently posted this excellent article examining if social networks like Facebook and email (yes, email is a social network nowadays) reflect your true friendships.
He showed me that social networking sites like Facebook might not seem as real as meeting a long-lost friend for lunch or talking with them on the phone, but they allow us to inject life into all those “stale” connections that have died off over the years as we move from life stage to life stage.
Chen’s post strongly supports my point that friends should keep blogs. It’s really hard to stay in touch with all your friends you have developed over the years. There are only so many people you can stay actively involved with on a daily or weekly basis (also known as Dunbar’s number).
His post takes you through normal stages of your life like early childhood, elementary school, high school, college, work etc and show how your real social networks change and evolve over time.
He also includes some great illustrations like this one:
Update: Chen’s above illustration shows all the social networks that a typical young professional develops over his or her life. Blue squares are “active” connections and gray squares are “stale” connections.
In summary, he shows that as we progress through life stages our social network continues to grow and expand. However, when we move from stage to stage, like high school to college, we leave a lot of connections stale. For instance, you might lose contact with people that played on the basketball team with your or who were in your 6th period History class.
Third reason, you never know when you’ll be able to use your blog to connect, communicate, collaborate or, for that matter, GET A JOB.
Not to toot my own horn, but the other day I was offered a position from a partner at the creative, innovative PR firm LaunchSquad. They do interesting work for startups and technology companies. The position was for their new social media team.
I was really flattered. Too bad I’m already happily working on my own project (will blog about it in the future). Definitely go check out LaunchSquad’s excellent Exclamation blog that is subscribed in my Google Reader.
That’s it folks. Those are my three strong reasons why everyone should blog.
Photo: Ben Fry
Here’s another roundup of the three reasons for why everyone should blog:
1) People are interesting
2) They inject life into “stale” connections allowing you to reconnect
3) They allow you to connect, communicate, collaborate, and most importantly, GET A JOB
Bonus:
Here are some of my friends interesting blogs (which you can also view over on the sidebar blogroll):
Tuftsmania – My friend Chris Nguyen’s music blog on whatever he is currently feeling.
Foe Paws – My friend Brian Kyle’s blog on the awesome hand-printed tees his company Foe Paws Apparel makes.
Wordbarf – My friend Sam Nam’s personal blog. He recently blogged a series of posts covering his experiences with a raw-only diet.
inRGB – My friend Jason Sherwin’s blog covering the design scene. His blog is super good and beautiful.
Citroen ID19 Hot Rod – My dad’s blog covering his Citroen’s blasphemous transformation from a classic French 1964 ID19 to an American hot rod.
The Phlog – Collective photo blog for a whole bunch of my friends who are all amazing photographers (Note: some of us are pretty amateur).
