everyday j

Lie #3: Blogs are personal journals.

Your blog is a record of what you’re thinking, and that record will represent you online, as a high-ranking search result when someone googles your name. So if you care about building a network, you’ll stop using your blog as a diary.

Your blog is intellectual exercise for you—to keep yourself thinking in a disciplined wayabout things that interest you. And it’s an intellectual exercise for other people—to follow your thought process and decide if they’d like to engage you in conversation. The blogosphere is a cocktail party for the intelligentsia without J Brand jeans or Jimmy Choo shoes. It’s just ideas, bouncing back and forth, and you’re deciding who to talk to.

I know I’m always telling people to stop worrying about what their blog is going to be and to just start blogging. I say this assuming that you understand that a blog is a networking tool. It’s one of the most important ways you can create career stability, by being who you are and connecting with people who like you for who you are. Your blog is a career-management dream-come-true.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/10/21/4-lies-about-social-media/#more-4113

Jonathan Lethem

To be inside and outside experience at the same time is so basic to me that I wonder if there’s only inside. I suspect everyone has an outside version too. I suspect that’s why narrative is so tremendously appealing. There’s great evidence of everyone’s readiness to become their own narrators with something like a Facebook universe, but I think it was there underlying experience anyway.

from an interview with Douglas Rushkoff