To Blog, or Not To Blog?

“Doors are going to open... doors you can't even imagine exist.”

-Julie Powell

The blogging world is dynamic, eccentric and opinionated, but it is also very welcoming. With access to a computer and just an ounce of tech savvy, anyone can start writing a blog. They could start it for themselves or for a small forum, like my Independent Media class, or they could pursue an audience on a much larger scale. It's almost impossible to predict the potential popularity of one's blog, but if you can follow the basic instructions of those bloggers who came before you, there's no limit to what you can achieve in the online world.

I absolutely love blogs. I got into them right around the time my middle school starting giving us laptops to take home (they quickly found that giving preteen boys their own computers was not the best idea...). 

Anyway, I remember the summer reading initiative for freshman year of high school, Freakonomics, and how intrigued I was that so many aspects of life related to economic theory.

When I found the Freakonomics blog that correlated to the book, I was hooked. From there on out, I started turning to blogs for everything from help with school to what to wear to the best movies of the month. 

Blogs can be as basic or as complex as the writer decides it should, which is one of the best and worst qualities about blogging. Some are pointless, like this one about a character from Hey Arnold... but the most popular ones are meaningful and informative, like this and this. 

I think the coolest part of popular blogs is that many of them started with a pre-made template on an average person's computer. All it takes is inspiration, online connections and word-of-mouth to get a blog going!

Take Julie Powell, for example. Your average, middle-aged mother, working in a cubicle, with an unfulfilled passion for something from earlier in her life. Curiosity struck and one day Julie picked up her favorite cook book and looked at it in a new light...

"So, that book was there and this simmering frustration was there and this idea that had I always wanted to write and was very frustrated as a writer—so it all came together at once. Here is my subject, here is my regimen, this is how I am going to plug writing in it—through this new bizarro thing I don't understand called a blog—and it all came together like that."
Read more: http://www.oprah.com/food/Q-and-A-with-Julie-and-Julia-Author-Julie-Powell/2#ixzz2jF6kceRt

Julie began at page 1 and experimented with every recipe from Julia Child's famous "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," all while sharing each adventure on her little blog. And before she could say "Bon Appétit!" her blog was getting thousands of page views a day. 

Shortly thereafter, this telemarketer-slash-mother-turned-blogger was offered a book deal, and then came the movie, starring none other than a Miss Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. 

 

Whether or not you like Julie's writing (or cooking), there's no denying the inspiration you'll feel after reading about her climb to the top. Knowing that her blog started as a little "Julie/Julia Project" for her friends and family and turned into so much more would make any journalism kid (who, moi?) look at blogging as less of a "why" and more of a "why not?" 

What have we got to lose? If it's not great, nobody will read it and it'll just fade away into Internet oblivion. But if it's good...ooooh if it's good, you could wind up as a bestseller, being played by Amy Adams in your local movie theatre.