It's a Dog's Life Part 2

After you started your personal blog have you or have you been tempted to start a blog at work or use some sort of collaborative on-line media like a wiki?

I have actually started several other blogs. One of them is for the Texas Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association (yawn). We use it as a communication tool. I'm the chair of the education department. Yeah, that's exciting. We also have one at work but I don't post to it very often. I use a lot of Google documents. I use it to share docs between other librarians around the state of Texas. We collaborate on papers mostly. Because I am a university faculty member, we live under the publish or perish rule. Thus I am starting an electronic journal about digital librarianship. I'll be the editor and contributor. So I use a variety of social media tools to do my job.


Do you feel blogging has changed your writing style?

Blogging has changed my writing style. I think more about what the reader wants to hear than want I want to say. Combining the two is always in the back of my mind. I want to make my topic interesting to my readers but I don't want to talk down to them. They are some of the smartest people I don't know (or know). The last thing I want to do is make them feel silly. I mostly try to introduce them to things that they might not have heard of or to talk about historical events that they may not know all the details about. Then there is the food. I hadn't started out as a food blogger but that seems to be where I go. I cook a lot, I'm older than most of my readers, and I have a lot of cooking/housekeeping/home managing know-how to pass along. I'm everyone's mom but in a kinda of cool way. It's sad really but I'll take what I can get. I love the people that read my blog. I've connected with so many of them that I feel invested in them and their families in about the same way as I do my own kids. I want to pass on any information that will make their lives easier.

Have you ever thought of approaching stores that cater to vegetarians or health food stores or pet care stores to do product reviews?

I haven't thought too much about approaching stores that cater to vegetarians or health food stores. Probably because I've been so busy it hasn't really occurred to me. Plus, I'm not sure I want to buy into that whole blog for money thing. I do a lot of contract work so blogging is just a fun thing for me. Fun in a commitment kind of way. Safeway/Randalls just contacted me about linking and blogging for them but I turned them down for now. I'll probably be blogging for them if the offer is right and I can do it my way. It is very important for me to feel that I am honoring my vegetarian values. I guess I do blog for one vegetarian group. I do a meatless Monday blog and I encourage my readers to go meatless one day a week. It doesn't matter to me which day they do it. I feel it is very important that each of us do our part for the environment, for animals and for our own health by going meatless one day a week. Joey from John Hopkins uses my recipes and features my blog on their website periodically. So maybe that is selling out but I don't think so. I'm not getting paid for it. This is not to say that people who do make money from their blog are evil capitalist pigs. They are not. They have just found a place that works for them. It just doesn't work for me.