The Weird Business of Blogging

Hello Bloggers

Relatively speaking, I'm new to this blogging business. I do not know the rules, if there are rules, and I suspect there are, rules to everything. My supervisor at LaTrobe told me recently that bloggers do not like comments on their blog sites from strangers who cannot be identified from their own blogs. (I do have a blog and this is it) This might account for why when I sent a long and detailed comment to 'stripy socks' she did not publish it, or perhaps it got lost along the way and never reached her. But I am stunned at how suddenly hurt I felt, as if I had been excluded from this wonderful New Zealand group of mainly women, though there are a few male bloggers, who interact with one another so enthusiastically on all manner of things, from high art, philosophy, poetry to the domestic.

Here's me muddling on with my great long rambles of matters relevant to me, but I am not blogging 'properly', I'm sure. I have told my daughters that I am too text based. Who wants to read reams of text? I need to include images, but the only images of significance to me at this time are those in my head , or the ones I find in family photos and they feel a bit too much my children's business and not mine, so I continue to settle for text. Besides I've yet to learn the art of all this tagging and including photos and all the other wonderful things I see other people do in their blogs.

Another voice in my head says, forget it. You've too much to do already. Get on with your thesis, your serious writing. Blogging is like television watching. It's addictive. We got rid of our television fifteen years ago and now I limit myself to watching the occasional DVD on the computer screen, as do we all in this household, of mainly grown up daughters, my husband and I. But blogging is more than that. It demands an active readership, it demands a response.

I had thought to tell others in the comment sections of their blogs, the few that I read regularly that I am so concerned about these rules that I have become almost too shy to comment now. I feel like an elephant who enters a graceful dinner party conducted by gazelles. They do not want me there. Could this be true?

So many people write that they want comments and I am sure my comments are not hostile, at least I hope they do not read as hostile, but you never know. So on this self flagellatory note I leave off this posting in the hope that someone out there might tell me what if anything, I'm doing wrong.

One day down the track I might regret this message but for the time being I will let it stand. I think cyberspace is such a weird place to lose yourself.
Lis