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Why blog? Blogging is a platform for speaking your mind and influencing others in a particular direction. For example, the CBS Evening News doesn't come around and ask me my opinion on the burning issues of the day. You might think you have nothing particularly earth-shaking to say. But you have something no one else has - what life looks like from where you sit. And blogging is a way of contributing that perspective.

In particular, the things the world might find the most interesting in your blog are the things in which you are most interested. They could be the things in which you take the greatest joy, or things that burn your biscuits to a blackened spot on the cookie sheet. They could be the things that make you go "Hmm..."

One thing that seems to help focus one's writing in a blog is defining the scope of the blog in an inaugural post. It's a way of letting people know what your blog is about. You want to give people interested in reading about what you're writing, a fighting chance of finding what you're writing.

Let's suppose that you have identified some topics of interest, set up an account on some blogging platform, and written an inaugural post. How do your readers find your blog out of the 100-plus million blogs on the planet? I have some suggestions.

One of those suggestions is a service called Technorati. Technorati has a number of important functions. One of those functions is a repository of blog tags. Blog tags are keywords which briefly describe what your blog is about. A blog tag x is basically an assertion "I claim that this blog is about x."

In addition to being a repository for blog tags, Technorati also provides a post tagging facility, a mechanism for claiming that a post is about a certain subject. Let's suppose you wrote a post about the New Hampshire Presidential primary election. If you add a link to

http://technorati.com/tag/ne w+hampshire

to your post, anyone who clicks on that link will arrive at a page showing other posts that included that tag.

I therefore suggest 1) that you go to Technorati and make some claims as to what your blog is about, 2) that when you write a post, put in Technorati tags which make claims as to what that post is about, 3) after you have published the post, click on the Technorati link to find other posts claiming to be about what you claim your post is about, and 4) visit some of those posts and comment, introducing yourself and your blog. If you do these things, something interesting will happen. I don't know what, but something interesting will happen.

Learn more about this author, Douglas Bass.
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