CORNER BROOK — Patrick Allen has been experimenting with keeping a personal blog for about a year and he’s available to help others get started blogging.
“It’s something that I’ve come to really enjoy doing and learn the value of,” said the CAP (Community Access Program) intern at the Corner Brook Public Library.
Allen said the success of blogs like the local CornerBrooker.com shows how many people you can reach with a blog and how versatile a blog can be. He said it’s hard to define a blog. The term comes from the phrase weblog, which is basically an online journal.
“But I kind of feel like that definition isn’t quite adequate anymore just because there’s so many different types of blogs and there’s lots of people who keep journals.”
People who travel use blogs as a way of staying in contact with people back home, companies use blogs to promote themselves and to connect with their customer base, and people with a passion for a variety of topics use them to share their thoughts and experiences.
Blogs are also great for burgeoning creative writers.
“They find that blogs are a great way that they can start publishing themselves and getting themselves available for public consumption and public viewing without having to necessarily be hired, or be found, or have to go through the process of submitting and doing peer review and all that stuff,” said Allen.
“They can just get themselves out there and be seen and find their own community and build their own discussion.”
Allen said there are a number of different hosts people can use when starting a blog, including WordPress and the Google-owned Blogger.
He uses WordPress for his film review blog, storefronttheatre.wordpress.com. For any blog site all you need to do is set up and account and start blogging. How often you post to your blog is something you decide and is quite varied.
“It’s your forum and you can do with it as you want,” said Allen.
“Generally it’s advised if you want to generate a consistent readership that you would want to have a regular schedule for posting.”
Once your blog is up the only thing you have to do is let people know about it.
And this is where blogs and social networks really work together.
Allen said you can post your blog or a link to it on your Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr accounts and to search engines like StumbleUpon.
Then there’s the good old-fashioned word of mouth, just telling people you know about your blog.
