Why Starting a Blog is Like Starting Email

I've been talking to a lot of people who are at the edge of starting blogs and fairly nervous about it. One of the fears is that once they start, they won't have much to say. While this actually could happen, I think it is unlikely.  I've been struggling to say why, but an idea just came to me while I was getting bored editing my Naked Conversations Galley Copy.

Remember when email just started up? We all marveled at it, but were unsure what to say to our friends.  So we forwarded jokes and we passed along information we received from friends who got it from sources unknown and it turned out to be false. Over time, people got to understand the email channel and how to use it and to that most of us have too little time to enjoy a good joke. We also learned to be extremely careful about sending along potentially damaging information from unknown sources.

Now we are swamped in email--email that we cannot live without. I just suffered a week of email woes while traveling and a day later, I'm still scrambling to catch up with my work. We are mostly prudent in what we send and we understand the problem with the channel is that bad guys continue to gunk it up/

Blogging is like this.  It is new and many people don't know how to use it.  But once they use it, they will find an endless amount of things to say. People go through trial and error, but they learn to be accurate and relevant, and they become less fearful of the channel.  Finally they will wonder how they spent all those years living without it.

Comments

[Blaine Moore (Run to Win)]

Great analogy.

[Jozef Imrich]

Shel

I still view blogging as emailing to everybody ;-)

[Ivan Chew]

Blogging is sometimes like email -- where you hit the "SEND TO ALL" button when you meant to send to 1 and not 100, and then being pleasantly surprised when you get some positive responses from 10 people who like what you write.

Also, blogging is like email where you find that you've sent a mail in anger and then debating if you should sendi an apology or just leave it at that.