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Personal Blogs

A personal blog can be a place where a blogger talks about his or her daily life, daily outtake on things, or even opinions about certain topics. A personal touch is added where the personal and human emotion and feeling and analysis, among several other things, are given preference over business or non-personal attitudes. I also recently talked about how personal blogs can and should have subniches, something which has not yet been done effectively because many people still think personal blogging is not a niche at all. Spoken-For and BubblesSoc are examples of how personal blogs can compete with non-personal blogs very effectively with interesting, personal designs and useful perspective on things.

Non-Personal Blogs

A non-personal blog can be a place where a blogger does not aim to get personal with the readers. For example, places like Google Analytics Blog, MyBlogLog Blog, and even CopyBlogger are places where the focus of an entity is on a certain topic and promoting an idea to the readers. In this case, Google and MyBlogLog blogs are simply advertisements and news blogs, promoting a certain company and its products and services. CopyBlogger is a great example of a non-personal blog that delivers very useful information to people looking for help with online copy writing.

Are there any other categories?

Yes, and I think you are looking at one of them. A third kind of category is a hybrid of personal blogs, non-personal blogs and a few other things. The personal message, ideas, ideals and values are never let go, and the actual style changes depending on the message at hand. I also like to think that every blog can be a personal blog, if certain elements are present in that blog.

Do you prefer non-personal blogs over personal blogs? How about your own blog, or the blogs you read?

What is your opinion about this? Do you prefer reading or writing non-personal blogs over personal blogs? Would you consider a personal blogger as important as a non-personal blogger?

Thank you for reading.

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I wonder if many people consider new content, posted on a regular schedule, to be a blog, if that content has one or a combination of the following:

• Time stamp
• Different titles for different content
• A kind of a specific approach to the topics
• Claiming the content to be a blog - if you call it something, some people may call it the same thing instantly
• Allowing comments on the content
• Talking about specific type of content

These points, among many others, are typically found in “blogs.” If you take away all these elements and more from any site, the question moves from “Is this a blog?” to “What elements describe a blog, without which something can absolutely, under any circumstances, can never be a blog?”

Is it regularly updated and posted content? Maybe.

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I’ve used AOL in the past as a backup, in case my broadband connection ever went down, or while moving to a place and waiting for a broadband connection to be setup. The “No Credit Card Required” slogan is wrong and misleading; you are required to give out your credit card information when taking the free trial offer. When I asked the customer support why this is the case, they said “We only take the credit card information in case you decide to continue using AOL after the free trial period, in which case you don’t have to go through the hassle of calling us again, and you can continue to use your AOL account uninterrupted.” I think AOL can easily identify trial users by their names, phone numbers and addresses, and taking a credit card is in simple terms cashing in on the idea that the person will be charged automatically for at least one month in case they forget to cancel, and thus will be charged.

I’ve recently noticed PeoplePC, a newcomer in the field, advertise its service heavily. They’re trying to take dial-up customers away from AOL, using the same ads that have annoyed the living daylights out of many AOL customers. Be careful if you sign up with any service that says it will take your credit card information and yet won’t charge you; many times, such as in the case of AOL, you have to send a written letter to get your credit card information and your account deleted from their servers. Still, that won’t take you off their “spam with AOL offer cd and emails” list, but that’s a topic for another day.

May be I should get a TiVo and do away with advertisements all together.

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Almost every brand name and advertisement comes with the “*” symbol, the dreaded asterisk. This asterisk mentions, in very small print, all the side effects of that advertisement. Sometimes an advertisement will not mention the asterisk but mention how a sale is about to end and how you’ll never get that price again. However, a week after the end of the sale, you see another sale, with similar or even lower prices. This somehow amounts to be false advertising in the views of many. Every brand name and advertisement is somehow associated with something marvelous that is only “perfect” in theory. For example, I find movies that say “based on a true story” to be practicing false advertising, as people go to such movies to see what really happened in real life, and later on we find out that the movie was “inspired” by a true story, and many times, such a story never even existed.

Sometimes people simply find major brand names to be unacceptable, and associate the names with what the real worth of the product is in the minds of those people. How many of us have made fun of the name “Starbucks” in ways that require children to cover their ears? I’m sure we’ve come up with lost of different names for different things that we don’t like ourselves [like the famous name for Burger King, which almost always comes to my mind whenever I see it].

Imagine how you can understand the following sentence, even though it uses brand names to explain different things and actions: “I woke up to the Casio and had Starbucks, then put on my Denim and my Nike, got into my Beamer and headed for McDonald’s, where I got a McGriddle and a Coke, then headed back to my home to watch a webcast on my Mac, later on played Xbox, and then saw a movie on my PSP and went to sleep after text messaging a friend and being on AIM for a while.”

Advertising and name branding really does work.

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While a perfume can be marketed as a product that will give you a preferable scent on/in your clothes when you socialize with people, it is usually marketed with the images of glamorization and unrealistic goals [such as attaining a figure or a perfect face, which has actually been digitally altered]. Such images tend to affect the personality of the young generation; they grow up to value such opinions and to target for such aims. Instead of buying a beauty product to fix a scar on the face or to use cologne, we tend to buy a product in order to be like the ideal female/male shown in the product ad, or to attain a sense of happiness or pleasure shown in the ad, yet something which is not related to the product at all. Advertising isn’t evil; the way much of the advertisement is presented can be questioned, though.

Below is a picture of the American flag outside In-n-Out burger:

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