Categories: blogs
Date: 10 August 2010 21:04:04
One of the things I love about being on Twitter is that I find links to all sorts of different websites that I'd never have found otherwise. The internet really is brilliant! (although I really do need to take to heart the quote I saw on Twitter the other day which was so true I laughed (from @AdviceToWriters): "Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the internet." Anonymous (via @Quotes4Writers)).
Anyway. I've really enjoyed this evening reading the back posts of a blog someone on my Twitter feed linked to called the Seventeen Magazine Project, where an American teenager tried to spend a month living just according to the tips and underlying ethos of Seventeen Magazine. Most particularly I enjoyed her response to the experience, which was to start a photo project inviting submissions to finish the statement "Hey Mainstream Media! I am ...". She explains the project here and you can find submissions on more recent blogposts and at the flickr pool here.
I was also interested to read a post, also linked by someone I follow on Twitter, talking about whether parents (well, specifically mothers) should blog about their children. The post is here with a link to the blog post which prompted it. I think the specifically mothers bit is because there seems to be a "mommy/mummy blogger" phenomenon which is rather popular - having participated in the Gallery photography project a few times I'm aware of a number of those participants who blog mainly as "mummy bloggers" - rather than because it's having a go at mothers in particular. I should say here that in principle I don't particularly have a problem with the phenomenon, and some blogs are beautifully written, so I don't intend to criticise anyone for blogging about their children - particularly as someone who doesn't have children myself. But it is definitely food for thought and something I may blog more on later (see below).
At some point I intend to blog about why I blog (at all), as it's a subject I find really interesting from other people's perspectives and I'm finding all sorts of people are blogging similar sorts of things for all sorts of different reasons recently. I've even found a PhD thesis on the topic, believe it or not (I believe it, they research anything these days!). But that will have to wait till after my own poor neglected thesis is submitted. Come October I'll have so much time I won't know what to do with myself! In the meantime I may well be restricting my time everywhere (including Twitter, as it's such a distraction) - real life (and Very Real thesis) may well have to take the priority for a while.