Blogging is Fun and can be good for Business

I've been really busy and haven't been so good about checking and commenting on Gettin' Together in the last couple of weeks. It's so cool to see more of us using the blog to make posts and share photos, like Marybeth's and Julian's kids sharing their hedgehog story with everybody ... and Brenda's news about the competition she was in. And Peter and Roma buying that backhoe -- way to go! It's great to read about all these things and see them in photos here, and not have a ton of emails to sort through.

Anyway, I want to encourage more of you to join the family blog! Come on, join in and add your voice to the fun. It's all good -- getting to know each other better this way. Plus, one of the neatest thing about blogging is the ability to make comments. Comments are great. Comments are not absolutely necessary to enjoying writing blog posts, but comments sure help the writers and photographers and everyone feel like someone is listening, and comments make for better conversations.

At some point (depending on how much participation the blog is getting) I will write a post about an easy way to keep track of the comments you have made on the blog, so you can actually carry on a conversation in the comments area of a blog post. Hope that makes sense. I don't want to complicate things for now, though.

So, this is a long way to get around to introducing some of you to blogs I think you might enjoy...
Click on the bold words to go to any of the links I've described.

Moira, there are lots of veterinarians who have their own blogs, some of them do it for fun, others as a way to create publicity for their veterinary clinics, others probably blog for the community aspect of it. Gina Spadafori is a syndicated pet care columnist I met through Flickr, because I was sharing photos of Sam, and she asked me to join the Flickr flatcoated retrievers group. So that's how I discovered her blog, called Dogma, and I've been reading it pretty regularly. She recently told her readers about this other blog, called Pet Peeves, which seems like a really interesting medically oriented vet's blog. You might want to check them out.

Marybeth and Peter, you wouldn't believe the thousands -- probably more like tens of thousands, of artist's blogs out there. Most of the blogs I read with any regularity are artist's blogs. Some of the blogs I like best aren't written by the best artists, but as people, they're really nice and I like conversing with them. There is at least one group of artists who are going through the book, "The Artist's Way" together (if you aren't familiar with that book, I think you'd really like it. I did the whole thing a few years ago when it first came out.) Anyway, it's a neat way to do something that takes discipline and concentration -- to do it with a group of like-minded people. Even if the community exists in cyberspace, in some ways it's as cohesive of a community as any "real-life" community. Here are a few: Serena Fenton's Layers of Meaning. Kat started one of the Artist's Way groups on her Kat's Paws blog. Check out one of her gallery pages. An artist's group I personally belong to is the Utata group, which I've written about before. Here is the index of the group's blog posts. This guy, Danny Gregory is a musician, artist, author, dad and lots of other things. Living with his wife and lotsa kids in NYC. I think he's cool. Plus I like his sketching style and he's not a bad musician. Mati Rose is an illustrator -- I like her blog.

The connections and networking that happen because of these artists' blogs is probably really good for getting their name out in public, selling their artwork, educating themselves about issues that are important to artists.

Mom and Margie, Tootsie and Jeanie, you might be interested in blogs about gardening. There are some so-so ones and some really good ones. It's a cool and easy way to keep up with the latest in the gardening world. If anyone is interested in any of these, just ask and I'll share some links.

And then there are the political blogs. But I don't really read those. Only once in awhile when a particular post comes across my radar (meaning somebody else sent it to me.) But someone else in our large and very diverse family might be interested in reading and maybe even writing a political blog. There are radical ones and super conservative political blogs. Whatever is your cup of tea.

Most important for all of you who may not be as comfortable cruising around on the internet as I am (and therefore you may be wary of leaving comments or even posting here) ... you can comment anonymously (although that's not as fun for the writers who get the comments) and you don't have to have your own blog to write a comment on any blog in the world. Some people set up their blogs so they get to "moderate" the comments before the comment actually shows up on their blog... but that's mainly to eliminate spam comments. It just means they get to approve or reject any comment. No big deal.

If it turns out you find a few blogs you'd like to read regularly, there are super easy ways to do that .... I use a free service called Bloglines -- it has all of the blogs I like in one place, and whenever there is an update to any of those blogs, they show up in bold, so I know if I want to check it out I just click on the blog name and voila. It takes me about 1/2 hour in the morning to read the ones I'm interested in. So I guess if you're super busy and you don't have that kind of time, you'd better not even open that can of worms.

okay, nuff for now. I always end up writing these really long blog posts. bleh. someday I'll get back to writing haiku. ;-))