growing a garden
July 14, 2009
Gardening is my great past time.
I often tell people that if growing a garden was like buying furniture I wouldn’t be sitting on a bean bag but a sofa that I grew from a little seed. I am terror-stricken by the sight of bare ground, it looks forlorn and lacking the embrace of a good firm root or two… or three.
If you think of words as the seeds of your thoughts and the blog as the garden it becomes obvious that the qualities required to maintain a luscious garden are not far removed from those of a vibrant blog. Duh, it may have been obvious to most, but it came as a surprise to me.
So here are some similarities that jumped to greet this thought:
- Young things need more care. When starting a blog it needs your care and attention more than at any other time. I read a tweet from a colleague that he hadn’t posted in almost a year and only now was beginning to lose readers. This was of course, as he hastened to add, due to his 200,000 archived words.
- Things sometimes crop up in your garden that you didn’t plan to plant. It may be tempting to pull them out as weeds but given time you may find that they grow into the focal point of your garden. I often find that my posts morph into something other than what my initial intention was. Their spontaneity makes for a more fluid style of writing that I yearn for in my more considered pieces.
- Weeds are bad. Remove them quick or they will sap valuable nutrients from your more deserving plants. This is a yogic contradiction, “One man’s weed is another man’s high”. The easiest translation to this conundrum is that ideas can get stale after a while. If you get stuck in a rut, don’t be afraid to uproot and start again.
- A healthy indigenous garden will encourage an ecosystem all of it’s own. By being aware of your local audience (in the blogosphere this is not necessarily a geographical local but a mindspace one) you can create an arena where like minded people converge and feed you and themselves with new and even more varied slants of thought. The thing to remember is that this sort of growth is organic in all senses of the word, be patient and enjoy the ride.
- Variety will create a more harmonious environment than a mono-cultural monotony. Keep your ideas varied, and exciting… most exciting of all for yourself the gardener. I’m not sure how well this last bit of advice pans out. I’m still new to this game and I notice that most people specialise a lot more than I do.
Just like you will often hear somebody bemoan their lack of green fingers, the lack of nurture or focus on one’s blog leads to the abrupt end of many a potential narrative. Full of the enthusiasm, surge of ideas and promise of a spirit killed before it’s time, abondoned blogs roam the interwebs like ghosts in a haunted house.
search for n – the end
June 2, 2009
Well today marked the end of the Nokia “Search for N” treasure hunt.
The last time I spoke about this competition, I used the title in my blog posting. It was terribly naughty of me I know, I succumbed to the temptation that I think has overwhelmed most on the blogosphere. I chose a snappy title that would generate salivating eye-candy. The winners have been announced by each of the distinguished personalities who were chosen to promote this latest and greatest device. You can check them out on http://www.simon.co.za , http://pauljacobson.org, http://www.imod.co.za and http://www.nafisa.co.za. Of course if you are reading this you either weren’t too clued up about the competition or just love my startling wit.
That title certainly did wonders for my little blog. These past few wintry days have had me rubbing my palms together in vertiginous glee as I watched my stats rocket like Astro_Mike. But now, like the irrational exuberance that has sunk global financial capitals, my numbers are also plummeting back to reality. I have seen a lot of blogs, which once were of interest and actually injected ideas into the blogosphere succumb to this numbers game. It’s sad, when a blog degenerates to being about who can regurgitate the fasted, the latest video or health update of Susan Boyle or comment on the vacuous exploits of Julius Malema (oops, that’s the mainstream media). It’s sad when tags are more important than the actual story, that’s what porn sites do, but it could be argued that a lot of blogging is whoring yourself anyway.
On the positive side though, stats are interesting tools that can help you to understand your audience. It’s a skill any writer must grapple with. But there is a line between understanding and whoring that must be tread lightly. I was reading today about such a fine line that our President Zuma will have to tread when presenting his first state of the nation. In his case of course, that line is between serving the people of the country as a whole and satisfying the desires of narrow interest groups. Fortunately for me, even with the help of the Nokia N97, this is a precipice I am not near having to leap across.
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