This sign was put up outside the SXSW in Austin, Texas last month, the annual show included a live episode of Diggnation at a local bar Stubbs. Evidentely, they reached capacity and a lot of jumped up little geeks were name/blog-dropping, feeling that this would impact enough on the bouncer to let them in. Louis showed me this last week when we were filming an episode of Tech-Squared, but they just covered it on Diggnation as well so, given it’s apparent coverage, I feel it’s something I have to say for my fellow bloggers.
Now then, I’m a blogger – that’s a fact, but I am also an aspiring writer. The line between blogger and writer is contentious but here’s my take on it: bloggers are people who write about personal things (i.e. an inane commentary on their comings and goings which only show that they have a boring and repetitive life) and people who give opinions on news relating to a certain topic, usually under a domain of their own name, like me. In early posts I mingled tech news with personal shit and, after realising this wasn’t what would interest people in my writing, made a cardinal rule to myself never to write anything personal and keep it closely stuck to the topics I write about. I consider myself a blogger specifically because I fit into the latter of the two types of blogger, but I also consider myself a writer because I do other things, such as writing for my Uni newspaper, technical writing and so on which allow me to practise writing in a serious capacity and will hopefully serve me well for a career as a writer. If I were writing my blog alone, I wouldn’t be, nor would consider myself to be, a writer – I would be a blogger. Being a blogger carries no shame in it, it simply means that one shouldn’t assume some sort of literary prowess from being able to sign up to Wordpress.
I’ve certainly never considered my blog as something meaningful in technology news because, let’s face it – it isn’t. My Google Analytics results are not something to be impressed by. Even if I was gaining a significant number of hits, I would never consider something like that to be in any way impressive – I don’t include this blog on my CV specifically because it’s a cliché, every geek or wannabe writer mentions a blog or gives a URL in the vain hope that this will seem impressive but we all know perfectly well that it doesn’t. My other undertakings in the field of writing allow me to practise writing, blogging also allows me to practise writing – but practise is no substitute for the real thing – until I have something meaningful published, I am simply an aspiring writer.
I like to think that most bloggers don’t consider themselves writers, and certainly don’t believe that they can gain any sort of status from this fact. Some do and that’s, in a word, hilarious – plus it’s stirred me to write a long brewing post on blogging, even better.
