When I ask my students how many of them read blogs, in a class of 19, maybe one or two hands go up. Sometimes none. Blogging is an old folks thing. As is Facebook–“I only use that to talk to my grandma,” is what I typically hear from eighteen-year-olds today.
In my Digital Rhetoric class, I usually assign Andrew Sullivan’s “Why I Blog.” In the essay, Sullivan outlines the pros and cons of blogging. Most are what you would call double-edged swords: the lack of an editor, the immediate and unfiltered feedback from readers, and the thrill of writing and publishing to an audience in real time. “A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world,” Sullivan says. “For bloggers, the deadline is always now.”
As someone who spends a lot of time writing to an audience of one, I find blogging equally exciting. My interest in blogging, combined with a growing need to house the links to my varied work, has led me to create this website, Write Like Mike.
I can’t say how often I will post, or what those posts may entail, but I do have a few goals in mind: 1) to share my writing successes and failures 2) to offer support to those writers who, like me, are trying to write between jobs and other commitments, and 3) to offer tips and resources for teachers of college writing.
Don’t be afraid to stop by and see what’s new. I am admittedly a blogging novice, so your feedback and suggestions for future posts are welcome. I know we are all busy, so I will try and make my posts short and to the point, without pointless titles or stupid jokes.
Now, I have to show my grandma how to unfollow someone on Facebook…
Mike
write like mike 
Blogging’s all right. It’s the modern, refined-adult thing to do (like subscribing to the right magazines in the 90s).
Livejournals and Xangas are what make you old. Better to write for an audience of one, than an audience of none.
Look forward to your posts!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks, James! What’s a Xanga?
LikeLike
It was another one of those proto-blog websites. It wasn’t my thing in middle school or high school, so I could be remembering this wrong. From what I recall, it was (other than LiveJournal) where the anime-fans, emo-kids, artsy-types, and rich-girls-traveling-the-world would share their thoughts with the Internet in the early 2000s. It covered the demographic of the modern DeviantArt, Tumblr, and Instagram crowd.
A lot of users customized their own Xangas to be unique. I was impressed by the HTML/CSS that people were willing to figure out to make their own sites look just like they wanted. Even if they copy-pasted templates from somewhere else or took images they found, they showed great patience and effort in putting together Xangas they could be proud of. I remember a lot of custom cursors. Again, this wasn’t my scene, so I could be off about some of this.
It wasn’t very social-media-like back then, so the atmosphere was different. Everyone had their own isolated corner on the Net. Rather than clicking tags to be shown what’s trending, you stumbled upon Xangas like hidden groves. It carried a feeling of wonder and discovery whenever you found one that intersected your interest. But I suppose you could say that about all of cyberspace in those days.
LikeLiked by 1 person
As the saying goes: “Hit the bricks pal and beat it, because you are going out!”
Oh, have I got your attention now?
LikeLiked by 2 people
Will you go to lunch?
LikeLike