Finding an Outlet

Initially I was going to leave a comment on Kent Newsome's post "More on Getting Heard". However, one particular paragraph demanded a proper post. He writes,

So while I obviously enjoy writing, I want this site to be more than an online journal or a living Christmas letter for my extended family. I want it to be my side of a discussion on whatever topics come up. If my extended family was more interested in the internet as a way to stay connected, I could community build around that. If our friends had web sites (fat chance, it took all I had just to get them to sign up on flickr), I could build around that. I don't have that luxury, so I look to build connections with other people who write about the things I'm interested in.

This mirrors my own situation (and likely lots of other bloggers) to a spooky degree. For this reason I started a separate, more family-oriented blog some time after this one. I've had the same issue of not being surrounded by any like-minded (in a tech-interest way) people in my social circle. I needed somewhere to communicate my own varied interests. I laughed out loud at the part about flickr. As a matter of fact, I was most proud to see my brother-in-law start his own blog shortly thereafter. Mine has so far been a mostly family event oriented blog, but - and hopefully this doesn't sound too snarky - I hope it will be a source of education and not just a family newsletter. I am trying to be careful not to scare them away. Lure them in with family photos and expose them to some interesting things in the process hopefully. Sounds kind of deceitful when put like that, but accurate I suppose.

Of course I'm not expecting many (or in fact any) of them to start blogging, but it would be nice to expose them to things other than e-mail, cnn.com and Amazon. Heck, I even coached my brother-in-law via email on how to edit the HTML in his blogger template to modify his link list and add a flickr zeitgeist. Amazingly, he didn't fall asleep reading the email, was successful at it, and found it quite easy!

With respect to Randy's A-List post that started all of this discussion and Brad Kellett's thoughts on the subject , it's interesting that my family-oriented blog will likely never see even 10 regular readers, but it may become just as important to me as this one.