Category Archives: Blogging and Storytelling

So, I went to 5th and 6th grade with Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine fame. Yeah, probably lots of people have met Jarvis, described as “Blog Daddy” in a CNN screen capture at BuzzMachine. But how many of them know that in 1964, today’s liberal wore a political campaign pin sporting … Continue reading →

Supporting the notion that blogging is a form of storytelling:

Michael Heraghty and Gerald Adams prepared a 500-word proposal for the European Conference on Weblogs, 2003.

The authors contend that if no story moves through the “blog,” it is not a blog. Ulp — beginning to wonder if my blog is a blog on that basis. Perhaps mine is the story of my exploration of story.

Key points that especially resonate with me:

I recently received an article for publication from Suzanne Falter-Barns about how blogs are beating out ezines.

But I’m not so sure. I thought about ezine publishers I know who have switched to a blog format. Find Your Way was a newsletter that became a blog. It’s a good one, too, but I never think to check it out since I’m no longer receiving mailings about it from its publisher, Liz Sumner. In contrast, I get regular mailings from Kevin Donlin, who used to send an ezine but now sends monthly reminders of his blog. I rarely visit the blog, though, because the monthly reminders have sometimes linked to an annoying “audio postcard.” One of my favorite ezines is Jennifer Warwick’s Success Tips for Gutsy Women! Jennifer has just announced that she has started a blog, but she says the blog will fill a void between issues of her ezine. That seems to me to be a better approach than abandoning an ezine format altogether. At Quintessential Careers, we have an ezine, QuintZine, as well as what I would call a quasi-blog. If you don’t have both — or at least regular reminders to subscribers that they can visit your blog — readers may forget about you.

Many of Falter-Barns’s assertions make it seem as though blogs are better for the reader, but she actually makes them sound easier for the creator. She does make the point that if you trade your ezine in for a blog, you will no longer have to mess with subscription lists, which is a pretty good point. She says that all the e-marketers she knows have lost subscribers. QuintZine has not significantly lost subscribers since the Great AOL Meltdown (when AOL arbitrarily decided that we were spamming all our opt-in AOL subscribers, and we removed them from the list), but our list has remained static for more than a year. And we do all our circulation functions manually, so it would be kind of nice not to have to do that. Of course, at QuintCareers, it’s actually sort of a goal to lose subscribers because that means they have found a job and no longer need our advice.

Anyway, here’s Falter-Barns’s article:

I was all set this morning to write about something totally different in this issue … but thanks to the power of blogs, I’m here to deliver a totally different message. Namely the ascendance of blogs over ezines. Continue reading →

I’m winding up a 13-day trip for my PhD program, during which I wanted to make blog entries every day, but I always had more pressing obligations. On my drive from VA to NH, I listened to an audiobook by Hugh Hewitt on blogging. I think that blogging about the … Continue reading →

Visitors can probably tell that I’m a total blogging newbie. I think of myself as somewhat tech savvy for someone of my age, but there’s a lot to learn about publishing a blog — a whole new vocabulary. RSS, pinging, trackback, CSS, XML. I have been keeping a quasi-blog for … Continue reading →