Bloggers - What is it like and how do you do it?

[LiquidShu]

Hello fellow Fuwans. A few days ago I started thinking about blogging and everything that may entail. This isn't necessarily a thread on "Help, how do I start blogging?" since I can just look that up on Google. Rather, I want to know what's it like to blog, how long have you been doing it, why you do it, what you blog about, etc., from the eyes of a member of Fuwanovel. You don't have to write on the Fuwa blogs, anywhere will do, I am just intrigued as to what blogging entails for you.  

[sanahtlig]

Generally each blog post I write must meet all of the following criteria:

1. Be of interest to me
2. Be of interest to my readers
3. Disseminate an idea or promote a cause that I think is worthwhile
4. Provide original content that isn't available elsewhere

I later came to the sinking realization that certain types of content drive much more traffic and are far less effortful to create than others.  For example, reblogging popular content (like mainstream news sites do) is relatively effortless for the amount of traffic it generates.

Honestly, I'd recommend just creating content that you yourself would want to read.

[Clephas]

I've been doing my VN blog for over a year now (two and a half if you include the VN of the Month and Random VN threads).  My advice is... decide what you want to blog on in a general sense in advance and put it up as your mission statement from the beginning.  I write on the Japanese VNs released every month as well as VNs I draw out of my backlog... as well as generalized otaku posts.  In other words, it is an otaku blog.   I honestly never saw the point in reposting other people's content, because my blog is intended to be informative and occasionally speculative on things not touched on or hardly touched upon in other otaku blogs rather than a rehashing of other people's content (deliberately, at least).  I rarely include anything from my personal life outside of the otaku sphere, because it isn't relevant to the purpose of the blog.

In other words, set down your purpose and keep your posts relevant to that purpose. 

I generally read the comments for the first week or so, then I stop paying attention to the post unless someone quotes me to get my attention (thank Tay and Nayleen for that function).

Make up your mind on whether you want to polish your content or just release it as you pull it out.  I generally post my comments on VNs immediately after I finish the VN or within a day, usually as a rough draft written in the Fuwa text box on my blog.   However, a lot of people choose to polish their posts in a word processor for some time before posting.  It's your choice, ultimately.

[Zakamutt]

I used to write an what you might at that point in history call an emo blog about random shit in my life, mostly whining about being depressed and failing at life and in school. I set it to not be indexed by Google. I think it had like 800 entries or something of varying quality, with wildly varying subjects and quality, before I called it quits and moved to a new one (which is linked in my signature and is an attempt to write things that are a bit less shitty, but still on the same track fundamentally).

I consider them to have/be fulfilling their purpose - amusing myself and perhaps a few other readers who know me on the Internet - so I'm perfectly okay with any suckitude involved. Other people blog for more constructive reasons; you may want to be one of them.

[LiquidShu]

Both posts so far seem to be "Do what you want" which I would expect to be pretty pivotal. They both seem to have at least partly the same goal, spreading information. I feel like Sanah's is more aggressive on the information at hand, focusing more on topics of debate and spreading the word. While Clephas still spreads information from his post, it seems a lot more relaxed and just talking about what ever he feels like in the otaku sphere.

The main reason blogging piqued my interest and I wanted to know more about it, is because I feel like my grammar, vocab, and ability to express myself are lacking. The ability to express myself is what I am really hitting for. 

^ Above was in the process of being typed as I went off to dinner (before Zaka posted).

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All three posts seem to have a varying degree of accepted level of polish. For my intents and purposes I would probably want to get it to the phase between rough draft and final draft, then polish it up. Either way since I want to become better at expressing myself and writing a good level of polish is probably what I would shoot for in the end. If you go to the "What are you watching now: Anime" thread and see my latest post you can see that I have quite a bit to work on. Anything beyond vague descriptions like "hype", "interesting", "awesome", "shit", "teared up", etc., is hard to convey. I feel a lot of things when playing/watching various media but can't express it very well. 

I also would want to use the blog as a way to become more knowledgeable about the otaku industries. I'm semi-knowledgeable about the game industry since I used to read Game Informer monthly and I now follow/listen to many people involved in the game industry.

Anyways, keep the posts coming (if you blog). Even if I wasn't interested in blogging myself I like to see why other people do it the way they do 

[Eclipsed]

I use my blog like a public diary, for whenever I feel like extensively rambling about anything and wanting to have those thoughts visible for all the glorious online lurkers to view at their leisure.

Most of the time though I just use this forum and the What are you Reading/Playing/Watching threads for the nice n' easy quick thoughts of my related activities, cuz extensive ramblings are, while fun, very, very taxing to me and I applaud all the people who are able to write up nice sounding reviews like Decay&others or phenomenal4/10 essays like bats

[Arcadeotic]

I first used my blog for my translation updates, but that's now useless, so I'm using for things that interest me/I want to promote/random updates

[Dergonu]

I just write whatever I feel like in it. I mean, thats what a blog is supposed to be, right? 

I think its a lot of fun. (Though I might suck at making reviews ..  ....) 

But I´ve been getting better since I started and the ability to just write out your thoughts on something, like a VN, and have others read it is quite a satisfying feeling. 

[sanahtlig]

7 hours ago, LiquidShu said:

For my intents and purposes I would probably want to get it to the phase between rough draft and final draft, then polish it up. Either way since I want to become better at expressing myself and writing a good level of polish is probably what I would shoot for in the end.

You don't need a blog to do that, and in fact I see maintaining a blog as an endpoint once you've mastered basic writing skills rather than a journey of discovery.  Here's what I'd recommend instead: pick a controversy in the VN scene.  Read up on it.  Then craft an argument and create a forum topic to discuss it.  You can count on forum dwellers like myself swooping in to pick it apart.  Repeat this 100x.  At the end you'll realize you've become far better at expressing yourself clearly and anticipating the holes in your arguments.  That's a much better strategy for accomplishing your stated goal than blogging about random nonsense, having only a handful of people read it, and even fewer who give you constructive criticism so you can improve.

[Valmore]

I only blog here, and rarely. Usually it's me ranting. If people read it, yay! If they respond, even better. It's more of an outlet, really, and I'm too lazy to find an actual blog site and besides, I like the people here.

[Down]

The main purpose of the blog I made recently is to have a place to write about things I want to write about in a longer and more constructed manner than forum posts and tweets, basically. It's useful since I like to write posts that link together various topics I'm interested in.  Sometimes some or several things have been simmering in my head for a while (e.g. the reaction of people to Conjueror's TL polls and the much broader topic of 'opinions' and their social origin, my first and only blog post so far) and I just want to have somewhere to dump it all in a structured text rather than leave it as an incoherent bundle of thoughts. 

I also intend to have translations of staff interviews (anime and maybe VNs), it's a resource that is kinda lacking in the western communities and I feel like contributing to it a little bit.

Since  I view it more as a placeholder than anything, I don't feel compelled to write on it in a regular and frequent way (which I'm absolutely incapable of doing anyway).