Early Reflections on Blogging

After getting a good, although short, sleep, I find myself thinking about the experience of starting this blog. Since one of the goals of this blog is to capture my efforts to learn new technology, I guess I'd better write down my thoughts!

The process of setting up this blog was amazingly easy. Blogger is a free Google app. I clicked on "create blog" and then followed the set up wizard that got me up and running very quickly...10 minutes or less. Unlike some other Google apps, I wasn't required to have to have a Google email (gmail) to use Blogger. Before I created my blog, I did a bit of doodling on paper to determine the name of my blog and the types of stuff I plan to document here. Blogger will easily allow my blog to evolve over time, but it was helpful to have put some thought into it before I got going...creating the title and description are part of the set-up wizard.

I've been looking at some of my friends' blogs that are also hosted by Blogger, and a couple of them don't follow the template format...they've added very cool sidebars that I'd like on my blog. I suspect that figuring out how to change the template will take longer than 10 minutes.

I've read that people can make money blogging. This is part of Web 2.0 that I don't understand! It must be from advertising, but an economy based on web advertising feels a bit bubblish to me.

Writing, is, as always, time consuming. At least for me. The "compose" screen is not too different from a regular word processor...it even has a spell check feature! But, it's also not quite as robust as a program like Word. It seems to be particularly cumbersome to get the big picture of what a post will actually look like on the blog. Anyway, regardless of the interface, writing takes time...time that I often don't have, so I suspect that this blog will be infrequently updated after the newness of it wears off.

I wonder, too, about the safety of posting information online. I've changed some settings so that it's unlikely that people I don't know will stumble upon this blog...and, I think I could make it completely private, only showing it to approved "friends". I have the same concerns about sharing information on Facebook, LibraryThing, and Ravelry. But, I'm intentionally trying to find the line between sharing too much and sharing enough to make the tool useful. It's an experiment, because someday in the not-too-distant future, my girls will want to do all of these things, and I need to understand the benefits and the dangers.

So far, I'm finding it quite exciting to be learning about Web 2.0...and a little astonished. Where have I been that I didn't realize just how far this stuff had been developed in such a short time? Oh yeah...moderating arguments between my twins!