Growing (My) Blogging Community

This week in my course, we are thinking and learning about growing a blogging community. After all, a blog with no readership is really more like a diary. And I don’t keep a diary. I do keep an iPhone notes app full of ideas – this is where I really intersect with the idea of blogging. A lot of my ideas are short thoughts, odd takes on the world or what-ifs. When asked if I have a blog – when I tell people I think of myself as a writer – I think of this sort of content. But I also think of blogging a whole story.

So first, my question of myself is, what is the topic of this blog? This blog right here, dbcox. Right now, the blog has a purpose: IST 600, Blogging for Information Professionals. However, I have not actually posted back a lot of what I am learning. In part, this is because I do not want to step on the professor’s toes. My professor is making his living in part by doing this stuff, and in many ways it would be plagiarism to turn around and give you, my reader, his lessons for free. Wouldn’t it? This is a question I ask myself, and would love feedback on.

However, I can blog on what I have learned about blogging so far from this blog, in a very meta sort of way. As such, the topic of this blog is about writing, and in particular blog writing, but also about writing in general.

Okay, now that the blog has a topic, I feel a bit more ownership.

Now for me, writing keeps coming back to that which has already been written. In part, because it never fails that I have an idea, and later find someone else has already had the idea, and written it. But also because I am a fan of the same sorts of things I would want to write about. So I love science fiction, and fantasy, and what if situations and alternate reality, and am working on learning about steampunk as it relates to all of these things… so my ideas both live in this space, and are about the things already there. So really, the video games posts make a lot of sense.

So if I am going to grow a community, first I needed a topic you could relate to and connect with. And that I could.