General

For those with personal blogs out there, who do you write for? Is there someone you gear your blog towards? Who is your audience?

In my case, I have a wide audience. I mostly write on personal matters and thoughts so the majority of my readers are people I know, either in real life or people I know from the internet. These people are friends and family that pretty much know what’s going on in my day to day life. I don’t really write for them though. In fact, if I didn’t write here I’m sure they’d keep up with my life in another way (and many do keep up with my life in multiple ways). I think mostly I write on this blog for myself. It’s not so much so other people can read my thoughts and what’s going on, it’s more for me to be able to organize my thoughts and put them down.

Sure, there are times when the post is dedicated to the audience at large, and an audience that extends well-beyond friends and family. My Song of the Week posts are made to expose new music to anyone who happens upon my site. Or take a post like The Genius of Tupac. Again, friends and family know what a fan of him I am, this was directed at a larger audience, especially people finding out what Tupac was about for the first time. And then there are my rants on various items, services, and stores to warn people of these things. Sometimes, I even like to throw in a post to show just how weird eccentric I really am. Every once in a while, I’d even write to a specific person (who I know still visits but I no longer write to them). For the most part though, I write for myself. This may not get me the most traffic or visitors, but I’m not trying to be the most popular. I’m just being me.

This week I joined the St. Louis Bloggers Guild. I know a couple other people that were part of it and I figured it would be a good way to meet fellow St. Louis bloggers. I’m interested to see what kind of things they do, what the meetings are like, and what kind of wisdom they can impart on me. I’ve been blogging for 4 years now so it will be interesting to see the different opinions on blogging, social media, software, etc. that I’m sure the fellow members will have. I really want to get more involved in social media, hit up events such as the Bloggers Guild meetings, tweet-ups, and blog conferences, if we ever get a big enough one to hit St. Louis. BlogOrlando sounded like a great time this year. I would like to see something that big hit St. Louis. One of these times I’m going to have to make it to a conference. I know I’ll never blog for a living, but I think it would be cool to meet people who do and see how they do it. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get into podcasting, but I have no idea what I’ll have to talk about. Unless there is a market for Saved by the Bell podcasts. Is there? Please tell me there is. :)

Today I found out about a piece of software called Asaph. It is a great microblogging system. What makes it so great is the ease in which you can post. Just drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks then whenever you want to post a new entry, you just select the text you want and click the bookmarklet. If you want to post an image, you click the bookmarklet and then select the image and it will automatically put it on your server for you. It’s an awesome tool and there is already talk of making a plugin for Habari. I’m hoping they do, then I might switch. Check out my shorts here.

I’ve also been posting a lot to Political Jackass this weekend, so if you’re interested in politics, hop on over. I’m trying to update several times a day. There is even a twitter account setup, you can follow Political Jackass at twitter.com/polijackass and read the political shorts at shorts.politicaljackass.com.

Yes, I got an Obama action figure from Jailbreak Toys. Now I think I need a McCain figure for Obama to beat up on. But then I’d have to spend money on something McCain, and to be honest, he is not worth a dime.