Stormy's Corner

Who do you blog for?

As most writers can tell you, you write for somebody else. You write because you want someone else to read your opinion, your knowledge or your funny stories. The problem is that many of us bloggers don't know exactly who we are writing for. A couple thousand people a day may land on your blog and despite the best analytics you may not know who they are. And who you write for may change. I originally started writing for my friends but over time I've picked up a large readership, many of whom I don't know personally. A very small percentage of readers actually leave comments so I don't really get a chance to know them.

I ask who you blog for because lately I've gotten a lot of comments about what I'm writing about, and I have to say, I've found some of them flattering, some of them funny and some insulting. I write about what I find interesting or important and I hope others find it interesting or educational, that's why I share it. I don't believe I actually write for any one audience. (Although occasionally I have an audience in mind when I write a particular post.)

So here are some comments I've gotten (I find many of them funny) and my response:

• "You don't do much work, you're always talking about surveys or hunting or kids." Hmm, this is Stormy's Corner, not Stormy's job log. While I tend to work a lot, I do lots of other things too and I write about whatever I want to share at the moment with no thought on how much I've blogged about "work" versus "family" versus "hobbies". (You can read about my work in the Foundation blog. And see the next point.) So if you think I have too much time to write about other things, I think perhaps you should get a few hobbies of your own too. Also note that most posts take me 20-30 minutes so it's not like I'm spending hours and hours writing ...
• "You write too much about work." I actually feel kind of bad for my readers that started reading this blog before I was allowed to blog about work and now are learning much more about open source software and GNOME than they ever wanted to know. Well, guys, it is an important part of my life, and I do think it's really important you understand how important open source software is for our world. Hopefully you can tell from the title whether or not you want to read the post and skip the rest.
• "Your posts are really different than the other posts on Planet GNOME and I appreciate reading about topics I wouldn't otherwise think about." Thanks!
• "You blog about hunting." Actually, I think I've only blogged about hunting once or twice. I understand many of my readers are vegetarians. Many of my friends and some of my family are vegetarian. My hunting posts are mostly about the people I hunt with not the nuts and bolts. Hunting is actually a highly controlled sport that is used for population control and revenue generation in the states, and I don't think it's evil but I'm not going to talk lots about it one way or the other. I don't push hunting here and I'd appreciate if you wouldn't insult my kids because you don't like the fact I hunt.
• "Where do you find time to blog?" I usually blog about things I've been thinking about. You could say I blog when I'm walking the dog or driving the car. By the time I sit down "to blog", I can usually type up the blog post in 20 minutes or so. (And sometimes I don't have enough time to think about any one thing long enough to construct a blog post - see the last few weeks ...)
•  "Where do you get your ideas?" From everywhere, all day long. I have a list a mile long on things I could blog about. Hopefully I screen enough of them that my blog is interesting. It seems to be working for my current readers.

So who do I write for? I don't really know. I know my readers contain:

• friends
• family - A couple of years ago I discovered that a great-aunt I hadn't seen since I was 3 years old was reading my blog! How awesome is that? I've also gotten to know a few of my cousins better though blogging.
• Planet GNOME readers
• Some press folks
• GNOME people
• People interested in open source software
• People whose blog I read
• People who think my kid stories are cute (who doesn't ;)
• People who found one or two of my posts really useful and so subscribed to the rest
• People I've met at conferences, ...

Who are you and why are you reading Stormy's Corner?

Who do you blog for?

My top 11 blog posts of 2008

My top 11 blog posts of the year. (11 because I didn't want the first one to be about me.)

The top 10 is never what I would have predicted but all topics I think are important.

11. Fundraising for a technical nonprofit
    
10. I'm the new Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation!
9. Cheap mini-laptop
8. How I'm learning to create effective presentations
7. Sneak preview of my talk next week: "GNOME as the computing platform for the future"
6. What do you have: time, resources or features?
   
5. Learning not to cry in today's workplace
4. Alabama literacy test: would you pass?
3. 20 things you can negotiate in a job offer
2. KDE vs GNOME
1. Why do netbook vendors make their own distribution?

It's now easier than ever to do what everyone else is doing

When it comes to making choices, people often default to "safety in numbers", i.e. what everyone else is doing. While the internet is widely applauded for bringing lots of information and reviews about products, it also allows you to judge what's most popular. For example, on Flickr you can see what cameras people are using:

Amusingly, I felt somehow good that I had bought the most popular camera without even knowing it was the most popular or "best" by popular choice. (Although I'm sure if I'd bought one of the others, I'd now be telling myself I did good not buying the camera everyone else bought!)

The internet is providing us more and more interesting data whether we use it for personal decision making, product decisions, political motives, convincing others, ...

My blogs shifting a bit

[Jan 12, 2009: I am blogging 100% on Stormy's Corner. Thanks for reading!]

From now on I will be putting most of my family and kid type posts on My Man's Man. So I'll have:

• Stormy on Open Source on OpenLogic's blog. Open source software and how it's changing the world. [As of 11/1/08, I am not blogging here anymore.]
• Stormy's Corner. Business, books, interesting articles, how the web is changing the world, and anything else I think is interesting enough to write about.
• My Man's Man. Kids, family, hunting, fishing, ...

So you can read whichever ones interest you. Thanks for hanging in there!

WWI Blog

There's a very cool diary of a World War I veteran created from his journal and pictures by his grandson.  If anybody would like to do something like this with any of my family members, I'd be happy to help out on the technical side!

On a similar note, my grandmother had a blog.  She wrote out all the stories long hand and mailed them to my mom who typed them in and posted them.  Then my aunt would print them out and take them over to my grandmother's for her to see.  She was very proud of being an author - she loved sharing stories.

Pioneer Woman featured on CNN

I really enjoy reading The Pioneer Woman's blog and I even bought her calendar because I like her pictures so much.  This is the woman who left Los Angeles, married a rancher and now home schools her four children.  And takes 75-150 pictures a day of life on the ranch.    I've wondered several times what she sounds like in person and what she looks like.  Well, she was featured on CNN so now I know!

Why do you blog? Do you care who Violent Acres is?

Blogs are like diaries but they are public.  They are obviously meant to be read, to be shared - otherwise why put them on the web, right?  That said, there are some blogs that make you wonder why people are writing that in public.  And I have to admit that lately there's been a few times where I had to stop myself from writing something on my blog - something I was upset about, wanted to share, but probably shouldn't share with the whole world.  (For example, imagine you are upset with something a colleague did or said at a meeting and it's so Dilbertesque that you want to write about it.   I had second thoughts on the wisdom of writing about that ...)  People that write blogs like that try very hard to keep them anonymous.

There are a couple of blogs that I follow that I'm not sure why I read them.  One of those is Violent Acres.  I feel like I'm reading someone's diary and yet I enjoy reading it.  Some of the things she says are things people never say in public but make total sense to me.  Like why are women obsessed with being fat?  Or of course she's writing for traffic not for herself, or she would have just written in her diary and stuffed it under her pillow.  So I can't understand why this reader got so upset about it:

This is why I’m done reading Violent Acres:
“For the official record, though, of course I write for the traffic. If I were ‘writing for myself,’ I’d type this shit up in microsoft word and put it under my pillow. I’m here to entertain you. If I wasn’t entertaining you, I’d likely stop writing…despite the fact that this site does turn a profit.”

That absolutely sickens me. Some of the things that V wrote about were very personal, tragic, and terrible. Very few people (me being one of them) would understand what it is like to go through some of the things that she wrote about. And now I found out that she wrote these things for a profit? What am I to think about that? Were any of them actually true? Did she embellish her stories to draw more people in? It is my belief that anyone who writes for traffic can’t be trusted to write honest content.

Basically, they no longer plan to read her blog because it was written for an audience!  Did they really believe that Violent Acres was writing a diary in public for herself with no regards to who read it??  They obviously wanted Violent Acres to keep up the charade.  (By the way there's a lot of hoopla right now - people are trying to figure out who Violent Acres is.  I agree with the group that says "I don't care."  It's highly unlikely I know the person anyway ... and I'm not really worried if her stories are 100% accurate or not.   I read them because I enjoy reading them.) 

Napa Valley Photo Being Used on Website

One of my photos from Napa is being used by Napa Valley Schmap.

Stormy's Blogs

So I got asked how I keep up so many blogs, so I thought I'd update on what blogs I have. Active blogs:

• [No longer posting here!] FlyTight.  This is a new blog about travel.  I added it at Frank's suggestion.  Check it out!
• [No longer posting here!] My OpenLogic blog.  This is my work blog and it's primarily on open source software.
• Stormy's Corner.  Anything I find interesting that doesn't fit in the above categories.

Not so active blogs:

• Living Well.  I started putting health related things here.  I rarely ever post but it still gets quite a bit of traffic.
• Dot Dog.  I used to have a lot of dog posts (that get a lot of traffic) so I consolidated them here.
• My Man's Man.  I was taking pictures and blogging about all the yummy food Frank makes.  I haven't posted in a while but Frank has his own blog now at Life of a Hunter!

And for those of you that are curious, my most consistent top posts by traffic are:

• Deciding to stop breastfeeding - a lot of people have shared their stories.  At least 30 people a day hit this post trying to find information about how to stop breastfeeding.
• How much do dogs sleep?
• No drinks for dogs!
• Kidney failure in dogs

(Note I didn't include the work blog in this as I don't have those stats.)

So it looks like if I want traffic, I should keep posting about dogs!

Videos of the kids

Here's a video of Caleb trying his bouncy swing for the first time! 

I finally started playing with the video function on my camera and Anita has helped me with editing them.  So here's my first video blog post.