Today’s question can be one of the most important questions, if not the most important question, for many bloggers. Why do you blog? If you run a website which is not a blog, why do you run that website?
There could be a lot of reasons why you may be blogging. You may do it for personal reasons, and you may be blogging for non-personal reasons. Some of the specific, different reasons you may blog is because you may want to:
RSS Feeds are becoming very common on the internet today. Thousands of people are subscribing to RSS feeds, the same way you may have subscribed to The Reasoner Rss Feed either via e-mail or a feed reader. However, what in the world is an RSS Feed? I am writing this brief introduction for a special friend and sharing it with you also, to tell you what RSS feeds are, and how RSS Feeds work.
I love watching movies at the movie theaters. The screens are big, the sound is louder and better, and I get to immerse myself more into the world created by the movie than is usually possible if I watched the same movie on a DVD at home. I also get to experience the reaction of others around me, which tells me how the movie appeals or does not appeal to certain people and their specific personality traits.
It seems, however, that as I watch more movies, the more bored I am with most of them. The surprising element in many movies has gone; majority of the movies depend on loud and sudden terror sounds in order to surprise you, and that is the only part of the movie where you will feel impressed by anything.
Following are 5 reasons many movies are boring. Please note that I decided to choose movies as they came to mind, so I may not have talked about movies that I usually talk about in person.
Beware! Some very basic movie spoilers ahead, and also my Amazon links.
This can be an important question to ask in order to realize how you want to communicate with your blog readers and commentors. Do you prefer having no comments on your blog, instead of having a lot of disagreeing comments?
The Art Of Reacting To Criticizing Comments applies to comments of almost any kind. You may be running a personal blog, a business blog, or some other kind of a blog, and may have enabled comments for the different content you post online. However, people may be disagreeing with what you say on a regular basis. Many of the disagreeing comments you receive may be very informative, yet those comments may be disagreeing with everything you have to express through your blog, all the time.
Would you prefer having no comments instead of dealing with comments and commentors that only exist to disagree with you? Do you prefer having no comments compared to having comments that disagree with you?
This is a fun question that can apply to your personally, as it depends on both your online and offline life. Do you feel obligated to blog regularly?
You may post daily, week, or on some other fixed schedule on your blog. You may also blog around a form of a regular schedule that revolves around things other than a specific time frame itself; you may base your posting schedule around offline events, your online and offline time schedule, etc. As shown below, there could be a few reasons why you may feel obligated to post on your blog on any kind of a regular schedule.
The debate of what defines a blog will probably continue forever, the same way the debate about what constitutes good writing has been going on for a long time. One of the things that I am noticing on many sites, is that any kind of regularly posted and updated writing is being considered a blog, including advertisements hidden in the form of supposed unbiased advice.
If you post something on a regular schedule, whether it is 10 times a day or once every 10 days, it can be considered and shown off as a blog without much disagreement from many people. Even if I post less about personal life and more about blogs, many people will still call it a blog, regardless of what I think.
That makes me think if the very essence of a blog can be divided and based on a single element, or even a single sole element, like regularly posted content.
“He’s just trying to impress me“, she said to me. I agreed with her; the guy in question was visiting from another country and was indeed trying to impress her at this party. However, me and my friend knew that this guy was just impressing her in order to appear as a good person. She told me she knew he was already in a relationship, and so was she, and she knew he wanted nothing from her. Even then, my friend thought about the reasons this guy would want to impress her.
She started questioning the possibility that he could be impressing her in order to appreciate her. That reminded me of my post last month in which I hinted at the question of whether or not impressing someone is the same as appreciating someone.
It seems that in many cases, one can effectively try to impress someone in order not to benefit themselves, but to appreciate the other person. This in turn automatically results in both parties benefiting, hopefully.
I get the car back from the mechanic after getting an oil change and a new fan belt for it, and I am told that the car needs a new radiator within a month or so, even though the same mechanic, on the last car change, only suggested getting a new fan belt. The bank tells me to go to their website and pay a certain fee for a program that will help me save “even more money” on my accounts, though I am not sure how I was saving any money already.
The grocery store cashier, while giving me a bag for my purchases, tells me that they will have a limited supply of a new brand of orange juice soon, and that I should come back to buy some within a few days or else they will all be sold out for a while. Maybe businesses know that I can be lured back in by attractive things like orange juice?
I got a call today from someone I had lent a few thousand dollars in 2003. That person had not contacted me for a while, so it was interesting for her to call me today and say something along the lines of “I’m sorry we haven’t talked for a while. I wanted to say thank you so much for helping me in the past, and I wanted to start paying you back starting from next year in small payments, if that’s ok.” Of course, that was ok for me since I know her a little bit, and I know she has good intentions. I think that is a nice thing to do: to call me and update me out of the blue.
Her phone call got me thinking today: How many people consider themselves poor overall? The person above was not poor but had a real emergency where she needed to borrow money to pay her ex-husband for her child’s custody. But, how can you realize whether or not you really are poor, even if you do not want to ask someone else for money?
In order to help people realize whether or not they are poor, I have created here a list of 5 reasons, or things, that probably hint that you are not a poor person in the year 2007. Some points are very specific, while others are general.
To make sure this list is fair for everyone, I will also list at least one exception to the rule, where the reason listed may not apply to some specific person.
Valerie and I were looking at several real estate listings last night, both in California and Missouri. A house with 4 bedrooms was for $329,700, while another one with 5 bedrooms was for $2.7 million. One house with two garages was for around $495,990, while another one with multiple garages was for around $19 million. For a certain price, you could buy an area on this earth that could hopefully belong to your name forever, unless a meteor comes along and changes things.
Valerie and I wondered if everyone who could afford those multi-million dollar homes was a drug lord. I know some of them are, for when you go out drinking with people, some of them will reveal the things they do to make their first million. It can indeed be a good thing to go out drinking with different people; you’ll learn how people do things like dealing with illegal drugs, even in counties and cities considered the safest in the country.
Today, I am thinking about the homes and the future of the online world, and not drugs. What I am thinking about is the online equivalent of homes. What are they? What is it in the online world, that you consider as important as your house?
This should be a fun question to think about, specially if you sometimes wonder whether you are a true friend or a true business person. Do you treat the people you know online, friends and others, the same way you treat friends and others in the offline world?
I talked about the possibility of treating online friends like offline friends earlier this year, and SP and Vera offered excellent views and opinions regarding the topic, like how it can be hard to find out if a person is a true friend online, or how online friends have something in common with you. Among some other variations, you could be treating online people the same, better or a bit worse or less than the way you treat your offline friends.
Today’s question is very important, as it can define and affect your relations with other people. Do you feel obligated to other people because of what you do on your or other blogs? Are you in blog debt?
Ronald asked me this question recently: is it possible to be in blogging debt the same as in the offline world? I think it is a very important question that many of us think about regularly, in one form or another. You may owe someone online something because of you asking them favors. Sometimes, people may do things for you and may expect you to do something in return, thus forcing you to be in blog debt. To be in a blog debt, your blog can be on its own domain, or you can have your blog through networks like MySpace or Mixi.
Following are a 5 examples of blog debts that you may end up owing others:
This post was actually intended as a comment response to my Peeve Week 2 post, “Mixing Spam and Invitation Perceptions Together” on Ronald’s site. Since it is turning into a discussion, Ronald is going to turn off comments on that original post, and the conversation can be carried on here.
Therefore, anytime I say something like “my comment above” or “my post above” or something similar, I am referring to my original post and comment, and other comments, on Ronald’s site. If you have no idea what I am talking about, and would like to know, please head on and read “Mixing Spam and Invitation Perceptions Together“, as that will hopefully explain everything about the context of this e-mail. Thank you. 
Hi “not george“,
First of all, Thanks for the comment. Ayya, this is going to be another long comment, which is definitely not good. I am hungry again, and I really need to write this quickly. It seems that the biggest issue here is the way a debate is carried on; I am trying to carry the argument using the logical points from my original post which are still valid as of now. My post was about showing how assumptions and perceptions about things can be different online, and hard to judge, and how peeves about online assumptions can be done in a peeve week project. You and George are focusing on how me thinking and assuming negatively about something that I consider part of a bulk mailing is not good, and that I should be not voice any concern, even through doubts and doubting my own self publicly, about anything and everything that comes through my contact form [even though the admins at MyBiggestComplaint have said and admitted that they did e-mail the same thing to multiple people].
What is the point of seeing a movie with enthusiasm when you know what will happen through the movie? Movie sequels usually end up being boring because of this exact reason. For example, take 
. By the time Mission Impossible III came out, one knew that no matter what happens, Tom Cruise, the main character of the movie, will not die in the end.
On the other hand, take 
Similar to knowing what will happen, you can know what will not happen and thus not be watching a movie with a 100% surprised interest. Typical date movies and many sequels depend on this reason to market themselves: if you saw 
In contrast, take the movie “
I love teaser trailers. They are different than the full trailers that tell you the whole story. Teaser trailers are usually half the length of full trailers. I love teaser trailers as they show some glimpse of an upcoming movie without being specific on the exact storyline. The regular trailers, however, tell you a lot about what will happen. Take the new 
In contrast to this, consider the current teaser trailer for “
How many date movies do you know which have the lead actors and actresses not getting the person they love? How many action movies do you know in which the action hero will save the day? How many big budget action movies these days only have lead actresses as the main character? 
On the other hand, 
Almost every other action movie today wants to use computerized special effects. Even simple car crash scenes are being digitized, and more and more movies are looking crappier instead of looking cooler. Take the movie “
On the other hand, take the 
Another example could be the 
The 
