I decided to read the interview of Scott Rosenberg by Rebecca Blood in her article “Bloggers on Blogging” in 2006. Scott, the Vice President of Salon, first encountered weblogs in 1997 and longed to have his own.
I found it interesting that the website that he worked at had a “tech log” that he wanted to turn into a blog, but was unable to do so for three whole years. Even then, it was at a low point in the company’s financial history that allowed him to make the deal where he could begin blogging.
Scott’s blog started off as an example to the audience of what a blog could be, which made me realize that a blog could literally be about anything, even blogging itself! He also mentioned that he would blog in between meetings during a particularly grueling part of his career, as a sort of escape from his job, to send his opinion into the world.
One point in the article that caught my eye was the fact that Radio Userland, through which he blogged, was a “for-pay” program. This made it difficult to gain too much fan base, as Scott says in the interview: “there were too many perfectly good free alternatives available.” Regardless, Scott’s page still managed to accumulate over 1.5 million views over the course of four years, which to me is pretty incredible. Having a thousand people read your thought everyday is astounding to think about. What is interesting is even at these incredible numbers; Technorati still only ranks Scott’s blog at 7,532.
Overall this interview gave me some insight to different aspects to blogging, such as keeping a backlog of blog ideas for when you don’t have a current topic to discuss. Scott also mentioned when he would find time to blog and how long it usually took him. Rosenberg talked about how his blogging actually complimented his non-blog writing, as it allowed him to write both long book, with not so long articles, which shows how blogs can benefit a writer. The thoughts of notable blogger Scott Rosenberg provided great insight to what it means and takes to be a blogger on the web.
Great post. I agree that keeping a list of possible blog topics handy is a wise idea. Back when I wrote a regular newspaper column, I had an "idea file" full of ideas and even short sketched of columns I could use if nothing interesting was going one that particular week. I never used most of the ideas but it was nice having something to fall back on just in case.
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