I recently got into blogging. To be more accurate, I recently got into reading blogs. I haven’t yet taken the plunge myself and created my own, but I’m pretty sure it’s inevitable: My girlfriend blogs.
I was patronizing at first about her penchant for posting her life on the interwebs. “Oh that’s cute, you’re working on your little blog.” She’d just smile slyly and keep working, with me unaware that she was patronizing me. As I watched her build her blog from scratch into a professional site, complete with sponsored giveaways and dedicated followers, I’ve come to realize that the blogosphere offers an enormous opportunity for us as individuals and as a society.
Frankly, a college degree alone isn’t going to get it done anymore. A graduate degree is the new bachelor’s, and our economy is in the toilet after years of terrible economic policy. The employment landscape for graduating students has never looked so grim. In order to get a job, you need to be more than one-dimensional. In this day and age, a blog is a valuable weapon to have in your holster.
The actual creation of a blog involves specific, marketable skills that look very impressive to potential employers. They offer real world training in Web-development language, graphic design and a digital display of your writing talent.
What’s more, simply having a blog that you spend time on shows positive aspects of your personal character. Employers want to see that you’re motivated and have some degree of intelligence, and regardless of its content, a blog shows that. When interviewing with ten other candidates for that first position after graduation, your blog just might put you a cut above the rest.
So, what to write about? That’s another benefit of blogs: Write about what you want to write about. It gives you the freedom to be your own editor, to produce something of substance and develop your craft without the pressure of school or work. It is very entrepreneurial, to the extent that many successful bloggers live off of the advertising revenue generated by their site.
But be wary of pipedreams: The markets for blogs that cover certain topics — like celebrity gossip, music, and mommy blogs — are oversaturated with producers, with a few established giants and a gaggle of underlings fighting a losing battle for recognition.
As a political science major, I stand almost no chance of ever reaching a wide audience if I entered the bullring that is national political blogging. There are only so many times a person can read the same tired opinion on health care reform or look at the same pictures of Tiger Woods in rehab. Everyone is going to get their daily fix of that kind of info-tainment from the major players in the industry. So unless you are astronomically ahead of the curve about some particular issue, or you’ve got an inside track on a new industry or technology, there is little chance that you are going to churn out the next Huffington Post or Perez Hilton from your bedroom.
But that type of mentality is missing the point. It shouldn’t be about influence, it should be about community. We need to worry less about being on the right side of big national issues that dominate pop culture — which don’t measurably affect our lives, anyway — and start trying to connect with other people about the day-to-day issues that affect them. Done right, blogging is a great way to create those connections and help yourself at the same time.
Reach Ryan at ryan.m.sweeney@asu.edu
