plans

It's been a busy start to the new year and I'm a little behind on where I wanted to be with the pre-work for this Saturday's kickoff of my first Blogging 101 workshop.

I have high hopes for the quality of the content and I'm currently sitting elbow deep in a slew of interesting statistics, techniques, lists, tips, and other assorted useful bits of information. Getting it all tied together into something coherent is a wonderfully frustrating exercise.

Granted, it also doesn't help that I keep popping off on research tangents and being interrupted by other things--welcome things like visiting friends and slightly less welcome things like bringing work home. But, the work is related to the non-work stuff, like this Blogging 101 workshop, so it all balances out, I suppose.

The various circles of friends I'm in have provided some great ideas about what they'd like to learn about in a Blogging 101 workshop. There are the very expected ones like "How to get traffic", "What platform to use", and "How to make it pay." There have also been some very insightful ones--like "How to deal with trolls" and dealing with privacy and safety.

If there's something you'd like to suggest, comment! If it doesn't make it into this workshop, it'll most certainly be fodder for a Blogging 201 workshop later.

This first one is made possible by the wonderful people from the DC Bloggers Meetup. RSVP for the event here.

I've been at this whole blogging thing for a while now... in one way or another since about the time I put my first website up in 1994.

Now, I haven't been quite as prolific or on top of things over the years as some people I know, but I have been paying attention to the ebb and flow of it all. I've seen the maturation of the blog--it's crawl into the mainstream of society and business. It's boom into buzzword-dom and something to alternately snipe at or applaud.

I've seen it transform the way people get their news, make their friends, work, play and otherwise live their lives.

Right now, I'm (sometimes barely) maintaining a handful of blogs: Durosia.com, The Searcher Journal, How to Crush Without Being Crushed, ToobTalk and my LiveJournal. Recently, I've added Twitter to my bag of tricks. For years I've toyed with the idea of really diving in and making something of all that online real estate, maybe trying to recoup some of the dollars I've spent on hosting, maybe reach more people who can be educated or entertained (or both) by what I write.

Well, the time is now.

I'm kicking off the new year by presenting a Blogging 101 seminar as part of a new series of talks through the DC Bloggers group (see their MeetUp page, too). It'll be happening at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, 9 January, at the Cleveland Park Library.

There will, of course, be numerous mentions of this as the day approaches.

But first, I'm going to ask all of you a question: What do you most want to know about blogging?