Is MN the right place to write a blog?

[lostinafrica]

Have started a blog on MN recently, but am a bit disappointed with the only theme available. I don't have lots of time to spend on making a blog beautiful and don't have good quality photos to put on one anyway, so in a way simple is good. But do you think potential readers will be put off by the look of it?

[NetworkGuy]

I doubt readers would be put off - not sure how easy it is for MN blogs to be located, however, since it must take web crawlers (which gather the links to go into search engines) ages to traverse the thousands of pages on MN, and then for each user, visit their profile and then the link to their blog.

I suppose one way for people to have their MN Blog found would be to have their own domain name (which would be found) but in many cases those domain names would themselves become a "giveaway" as to the person's identity (whereas MN names are anonymous, unless someone decides to put more info on the web that makes them easy to identify.

I suppose one could use MN's blog as a fairly private (and hopefully constructive, if one had not-too-critical feedback from readers) place in which to find your feet and then go off to blog anonymously (or otherwise) on one of the other blogging services, where your comments would be found easily and there'd be no obvious link to your identity, nor to MN postings (whereas a blog here is definitely tied to everything else you have posted on MN Talk, so there may be a case of "too much information" being collected together... IYSWIM).

For example... say you have a strong interest /are expert in some subject and put together some great blog posts... everything is fine but you had an abusive father, a drug-dealing daughter, an alcoholic partner who committed suicide, etc ... you get the picture... what one might have posted on MN could be linked to the blog posts, and one may not want such information so public, esp if the blog got to be very popular among stamp collectors / rug makers / paper plane distance record competitors etc... whichever group your blog appeals to. Sorry, the combination of a persons history was deliberately OTT but was there to illustrate just how much someone might have posted on MN, and if the blog was of major interest because of expertise in a particular field, then those links might be better left unmade.. so in my view, experiment on MN, and then seek out the many popular free Blog services and consider one of those for longer term output...

Good luck with your blogging, and hope you have fun...

[lostinafrica]

Thanks, NetworkGuy. I've been thinking about what you said and it makes a lot of sense. I have blogged in the past for family and friends, but I want to be free to say what's on my mind without worrying what my mum might think, for example! So I'm just now putting together a blog on one of those other providers, where I can do a bit more with it (might actually enjoy myself and add a photo or two, who knows!), having started to sort out in my mind what it is I want to talk about while writing the MN blog.

I'm not going to link to it on the Introductions thread, though, so as to keep it separate from my MN identity. :o

[NetworkGuy]

:)