I used to stand upon the round table to blog. Boy that was stupid!

In the beginning...blogging seemed to be something like this to me:

You arrive at a football stadium with a gigantic round table on the field. As a blogger you are an active part of the conversation going on at the round table so you have to move your ass from the audience to the table, jump upon it and talk!

Alot of noise on the field so you better have to say something of value.  After you said what you wanted to share - people can respond and tell you their thoughts about it.

Wrong. That´s not a conversation!

Now here´s how I see blogging today:

Nobody stand UPON the round table! Everyone is sitting AT the round table talking to the people next to her. Sometimes you stand up to move a little bit and take another seat to talk to new people. And if any of these micro-conversations has the potential - it spreads all around the round table!

There is a huge difference between understanding this intellectually and really getting it! I got it very recently and it made a huge difference.

Thank god most bloggers understand this better then I had! But for the others...here are some of the things I changed for a change:

• Join Blogging Networks ( have a look at 9Rules.com or MyBlogLog )
• Read alot of blogs and comment immediately if you have to say something ( here is a great post about strategic commenting from Amy Gahran )
• Weave links to others into your content and join in discussions that way ( actually that was a comment from Andy Beard that I received at the right time - thankx Andy)

Maybe there is a blogger who blogged TO the audience instead WITH´em that I helped a little bit with this post. I know I needed some help to GET IT!

UPDATE: Kudos to Liz for introducing me to the term "One-Nite-Link" Stands and for the lessons I´ve learned today while observating her as a master of conversational blogging!

And Kudos to Andy for making me aware of Mike Sansone´s Converstations Blog. Just to make the analogy perfect you have to read Mike´s post Which Arm Are You Blogging With?

 

Rock on! It´s time for a new learning lifestyle...

Steli Efti

P.S. If you visit a blog the next 3 days that makes you feel like someone´s standing upon the table - feel free to send him a note about this post ;-) maybe we can help him take a seat!

Comments

[Andy Beard]

Hi Steli

A great analogy.

We had another discussion about trackback, and I know why a trackback isn't working. They only work if you link to posts and not to a domain, unless someone is running some kind of referrer script.

What you should really have done in this artile is find 3 or 4 other blogger articles that talk about something similar (recently) and also link through to their blog posts with commentary.

As an example Mike Sansone at Converstations normally has a blog post on this subject almost daily, and hopefully he will see this . He certainly would have done if you had linked through to him and as the analogy is so perfect for his audience, he would also most likely share it with them.

[Steli]

Thankx Andy for just another great blog lesson! Blogging means learning and as a principal of a new kind of school this is exactly what I love about having a blog!

Much power to all of you guys!

[florence meichel]

Hello

I feel eactely the same : for me, Blogging today is more than a conversation : it's a co-construction where everyone is an author and contributes to the process ! It's a very powerfull difference, isn't ?

[Steli]

Yes, it is ;) Thankx florence for contributing so heavily! Much love to all supercool people!

[Tisha]

brilliant and informative, thanks for educating me!

[Steli Efti]

thankx tisha - you´re so welcome!

[GeologyJoe]

You have verbalized and generalized the blogosphere very well. My thoughts were similar.

[kayliz]

I was thinking along the same lines. Nice!

[Steli Efti]

Hey GeologyJoe,
Hey kayliz.

thankx for your comments guyz! I´m looking forward to many cool conversations with all of you!

[Vilyamph]

Hello! great idea of color of this siyte!

[Nika]

Good site! I'll stay reading! Keep improving!

[elpollo]

very well explained, need to make a video of it.