Blogging: Because I Need More Petri Dishes

Sterile is boring.

In my last post titled "Why Blogging", I discussed a little bit of why I decided to start but I'd like to do a little more of a deeper dive in this post.

Why I am blogging.
Because I need more petri dishes. As I business person, I am always interested in what works versus what does not. Via twitter & a little over 11,000 tweets later, I am fairly confident in what works for me & others for developing  microcontent. I can test out questions, topics & people on their platform but I really still don't know what works for me in terms of blogging. The learning curve was painful for twitter and this will be no different but there is no time like the present to start experimenting. When it comes to marketing it is generally about how you spin things & making your views the most palatable to others. This is very difficult for me because I generally just want to whack people over the head with my version of the truth and be done with it.

If I can take my thoughts and make them accessible to the masses then I have done my job. It has been fun being unpredictable and fly off half cocked but I will leave that for twitter. After saying that, I hope to keep it light, fun & yet interesting, like the feather at the beginning of "Forrest Gump." 

I would also like to thank @HeatherJStrout (her community management blog ) & @Aronado (his website for startups ) for urging me to do this. There were others but I specifically remember these two friends straight up telling me that I had to do this. Thanks y'all! It should have never taken this long!

So many of my friends are doing such a good job that I feel like I need to step my game up and contribute. I've been on twitter for a little over two years now & before that I was a Luddite or at the very least a technophobe & now I could tweet a hundred times a day if I felt like it. When I started on twitter, I was very confused & had little direction but with the help of community & my persistence, I do believe I've figured out A LOT about twitter. Now it is time to move into the blogging arena.

My writing skills lack something to be desired. The good news is "I don't have to be a journalist to be a good blogger." The bad news is, I need to be conscious of my audience & EDIT, EDIT, EDIT. One of my professor at UT Austin once told me that on average when most writers do their thing, they end up editing or completely removing about 2/3 of what they wrote. It makes sence because I can tend to run around issues or more often than not, "go all tangential on your ass." (this will be a later blog post).

Like I mentioned, I am on twitter already but I know I need a papa bear to all my baby bears. In terms of online content, twitter is my baby bears & my blog will be my papa bear. Related, if I get good at blogging, it might be a 'Big Love' situation with multiple papa bears but I digress. Tweets are great. I love twitter. On a 1 to 10 scale, I'd say I'm about an 8 on twitteraddictiveness. I'd like for that to be lower & I'd like to have the same love for my blog.

Twitter is great for a lot of things, but expressing bigger ideas & terms of influencing others, twitter is pretty wimpy versus creating a well written post. In a lot of ways, I feel like hitting my head against a wall on twitter because I've taken it as far as one can go without starting some new avenues for content creation. I've heard of twitter being called a gateway for blogging and for me this is true. I am still planning on tweeting all I can tweet but I want to have a nice mix of randomness & thoughtfulness whereas my tweets provide most of the randomness & my blog should act as the thoughtfulness (or at least the less random of the two).

I was planning on talking about my fears & why it has taken me this long to blog but this post seems like it should be wrapping up so I will save it for my next entry. If you have a story of why you finally decided to get into blogging or any blogging tips for a total n00b, I'd love to hear them.