When I joined Grand Effect, sarahintampa described me as having done ‘the blog thing for a long time’. Personally, I’ve never seen myself as a veteran blogger but how long does it take these days to become an experienced blogger?
sarahintampa is more experienced than me, having started blogging in January 2004 (I started in May 2005).
I would like to think I’ve come a long way as a blogger. My first posts were significantly worse than my latest ones and I originally used to just ‘repost’ other people’s stories mixing them with a bit of my sarcasm and cynacism!
Since becoming a blogger, I’ve switched from Blogger to MovableType and MovableType to WordPress. I’ve also joined 9rules and Grand Effect, and stopped relying on traffic exchanges like BlogExplosion and BlogMad for traffic. I like to think that as a blogger, I’ve matured.
So can experience as a blogger be measured in time? My answer is probably not. Someone like Jason Kottke is definitely experienced, having a blog which is popular with its readers and one which I’m sure he enjoys writing (I personally find blogging sometimes get a bit tiresome!), and based on the time he has blogged (since ‘98!) makes him a veteran. I would personally say anyone who started blogging before 2003 is a veteran because after 2004 it was starting to become mainstream!
To you what makes a veteran blogger? What makes an experienced one?
I have started blogging in August 2002 so based on your measure I’m experienced
Question is, how long did it take for me to realize that blogging is something more than just writing down notes and thoughts.
I blog for a living since 2005 and since that moment I think of myself as an experienced one.
Paul: Wow! You’re very experienced!
I think what I wrote recently can be called into use here. Being a veteran blogger is about realizing that at the end of the day, our blogs shouldn’t be that which affects our lives. Our blogs shouldn’t be the ones that celebrate milestones. Our blogs shouldn’t matter.
What matters is the way we live our life, our experience, our thoughts, our feelings and our knowledge. Our blogs are mere reflections of those. What makes what we write good is the way we lead our lives and what we learn from it.
I’ve been blogging since March 2003 and at the end of it, those dates don’t matter. What matters was where I am now and how far I’ve walked since then. I guess, it takes an experienced person who blogs (as opposed to just a “blogger”) to realize that.
[...] to last we have Webby’s World and a great article about being an experienced blogger. The article culminates in asking how people [...]