Tools of the tirade…

Having made my resolution to continue work on this, my first full year of blogging, I decided that I needed to embark on a burst of promotional duties to ensure that all my hard work would not go unappreciated.

In my ignorance, at the beginning I had assumed that once I had written a couple of pithy posts, and a few loyal readers had shared my wisdom amongst their friends, a cultural revolution would sweep across the entire internet, with me held triumphantly upon it’s metaphorical shoulders…

Well, ok, maybe I hadn’t envisaged that exactly, but it hadn’t really occurred to me the sheer numbers of blogs out there that I would be competing against.
Except I’ve now found that it’s even more complicated than that.

Because the thing I’ve discovered is, I’m not really competing, not in the real sense of partisan self-interest that would be involved in, for example, journalism, when everyone is chasing the same story or trying to steal each others scoops.
You see, what I failed to take into account is, bloggers are really nice people.

Everyone that I’ve so far had any contact with on my brief foray into the blogosphere has been, without exception, helpful, friendly, and more than willing to give advice and support to novices like myself.

Whether it’s someone from tumblr taking the time to promote me on their blog, the staff at the excellent BlogCatalog making me feel so welcome when I had no idea what I was doing, or a fellow blogger and new follower/followee giving me tips on finding inspiration, it’s really been a revelation how much of a community exists around blogging. And it’s this community spirit that keeps the whole cycle going.
We all love writing, and that’s because we all love reading. So everybody reads other people’s stuff, and they pass it to someone else they think will enjoy it, and they might look to see who passed it to them…….

There might be thousands upon thousands of bloggers out there, hoping someone will pluck their outpourings from the ether, but there are just as many fascinating subjects, places, and opinions that we can be introduced to, that it’s almost impossible to get bored.

Indeed, it’s now in danger of becoming a completely new vice – not getting any writing done because I spend too much time reading other people’s blogs.

But it’s the amount of time that I’ve spent on trying to promote the blog that has meant I’ve barely had any time to write it, so I’ve decided that I’ll rely on the small amount of momentum it’s picked up to increase the readership to a point I’m happy enough with that I don’t need to constantly plug it on every platform available, like some sort of blog-slut.

So, for now, it’s back to the search for inspiration.

I’ve got a feeling there will some nice photos in the next post..