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Uncategorized 6

Terrified of blogging? Join the club.

By Jeremy Snook · On April 25, 2008

With a mandate to post weekly to FTM, I find myself thrust upon stage, spotlights blinding me, microphone in hand, with a silent audience (with a cough or whisper floating through the blinding lights). What do I say? Will people care or, worse yet, vocally disagree? How can I survive this ordeal?

Sound familiar (please say yes)? Apparently others think so, too. When I Googled “blogging for dummies”, I got 715,000 results. Link #1 was for the Brad Hill (those yellow covers) book on Amazon.com, which seems to be slightly popular:

Here’s the interesting thing (for me, at least) – a similar Google for “public speaking for dummies” only returned 143,000 results. Public speaking is often touted as the single thing people fear most, even above death. Yet there are five times as many people interested in blogging as public speaking.

Is this because people have no idea how to blog, but are very interested in doing so? Or are many finding themselves on stage, staring an a full house, feeling the sweat run down their backs, desperate for some help?

What do you think?

By the way, if you are looking for blogging tips, check out these links:

Writing a Good Blog – For Dummies
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Blogs
(has good continue-on links)

~Jeremy

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6 Comments

  • Carie says: April 25, 2008 at 11:54 am

    I have to say, I’m surprised blogging makes you nervous Jeremy, as you’re so confident and comfortable about speaking up in class. 🙂

    I certainly wonder if I’m about to put myself in the hot seat when I blog – as you never know who’s watching, whether they’ll respond, and how – so there’s certainly a huge layer of uncertainty that comes with blogging.

    Maybe it’s partly that there’s the opportunity to respond anonymously to a blog post (or at least without a real face behind the screen name) that makes the idea of blogging more challenging. If someone wants to respond, criticize, or question what you say when speaking publicly – they have to do it publicly as well. Blogging allows for the anonymous attack and it’s a whole lot easier for many more people to respond as well.

    Maybe it’s the black void of “you don’t really know who you’re talking to” when you blog – communication is harder when you don’t know your audience.

    Your stats are fascinating though – I wouldn’t have thought to compare public speaking with blogging and am really surprised at the results. Especially as blogging (outside of school anyway) seems to be a pretty much voluntary activity (my company encourages people to blog, but it is by no means required), whereas public speaking is often something you’re forced to do by school or work. Most people aren’t going out there soliciting public speaking engagements – unless they’re some sort of consultant who is already comfortable with public speaking anyway.

    ~Carie

    Reply
  • Jeremy says: April 25, 2008 at 1:04 pm

    Giving presentations is easy – there’s no written record to agonize over. 🙂

    I think this uncertainty you and I experience is probably magnified by the thought of our corporations looming over our shoulders. Additionally, I suffer from a case of “does anyone really care?”; other bloggers don’t seem to have that issue.

    Reply
  • Yu-Lan says: April 25, 2008 at 11:54 pm

    I am a lousy blogger. I’ve been having my blog for more three years, I occasionally update it, maybe twice a month. I talk about almost everything on it, and I don’t care “does anyone really care” because I just take it as a personal journal, I try to make it readable, just in case “someone who might care”.

    Averagely I get about 30 visits a day, mostly from my friends in real life. I keep doing it, it’s fun and it makes me feel like there is a place where I can express myself to the “world” even nobody really cares. I’d like to have more audience, though, better than having better public speak ability since I don’t have the chance to speak publicly very often, but I do have the chance to make my blog better anytime if I want.

    Reply
  • yijen says: April 27, 2008 at 9:01 pm

    Jeremy, what you observed and your thought are very interesting. It reminds me to deliberate my feeling about blogs.

    I have been having my blog for four years, but I really don’t care whether someone on the Internet cares what I think or not. I personally think that it is much easier to attract audience to blogs than to keep them stay in blogs. Once a blogger provides some useful information such as travel experience or how to make up perfectly, some audiences will link to this blog by search engine and read them. However, once these audiences get what they need, they will leave this blog and never come back. Therefore, it is unnecessary for me to blog for catching the hearts of the audiences you may not know. I always express what I want to say on my blog . (of course, except bad comments about someone). That’s the meaning of blogs for me.

    Moreover, I found some interesting “ten commandments” of writing blog. Let’s take a look.

    1. blogging for fun ,for yourself, at least at begining
    2. don’t force yourself to blog just for periodically update.
    3. don’t limit your blog to min. or max. length.
    4. don’t blog just for audience.
    5. don’t be afraid of opposite comments.
    6. Blogging is to share your thought, your opinion, not your ” me too”.
    7. Blogging tools and interfaces are for convenience, not for “Wow! so fascinating!” The same as your site layout.
    8. If you don’t want someone reading your blog, never put it on.(Even he/she don’t know you have a blog)
    9. Try to remember why you are blogging.
    10. forget the first 9 rules. use the 10th instead: BLOG FOR YOURSELF!

    Reply
  • Adriana says: April 28, 2008 at 7:21 pm

    Yi Jen,

    I love your comment and completely agree. I personally think blogging is just a practice, at the beginning it may be intimidating but once you start you just get used to it, and better at it. Many times I have nothing to say, or nothing relevant which is why I keep 3 blogs going plus I still write my personal journals (yes good old pencil and paper). I mainly do it because I like writing, it allows me to think coherently and process information. And I love that in cyberspace thinks can be picked up all the time — I’ve written random stuff some of it gets attention, most of it doesn’t. Ultimately, it’s like having a really fun and on-going conversation with people and I find that fascinating (maybe it’s the cafe bohemian wanna be in me).

    Reply
  • GMK says: July 3, 2008 at 11:01 am

    I too am terrified of blogging. Was really into the idea at first and set up a new blog on blogspot and even got a gig at AOL writing for one of their blogs. I wrote one I was fairly proud of and then gave up after convincing myself that I no longer had anything to say (out of sheer fear I think.) I’ve also faced a lot of rejection in the past few years concerning my writing in general so “putting myself out there” is even more difficult for me now. I will check out some of the sites above though.

    Reply
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