Recently, I've been thinking about the direction which my blog has been taking. When I started out, I had a pretty clear idea of what my blog should NOT be like. I noticed some Muslim blogs emphasized information on fiqh or hadith-of-the-week type of stuff, which always struck me as strange because it is more natural for me to get that kind of information from a book (even an online book) when I'm interested in it. I also didn't feel like competing with the newsbloggers. I'm not a professional (nor even an amateur) reporter and don't have the resources to do what they do first-hand. At the other extreme, I didn't want to write the kind of self-indulgent, navel-gazing personal blog full of entries like "Tuesday, I had Fruit Loops. Tomorrow Captain Crunch". (For some reason, alot of the Xanga and livejournal users are in that genre). For me, the ideal blog would be as personal and honest as a diary and as timely and current as the news. And it should have content which is interesting and hard to find in a book. (On the other hand, maybe I should write a book based on the issues brought up in the blog?)
I'm not going to make any claims on how good Planet Grenada has been at avoiding the above-mentioned mistakes. I've been starting to feel like my blog has been a little link heavy. I can pass information along for people to read themselves, but I should probably put in more context and commentary. Copy-and-paste less, and "pontificate" more. I really appreciate the way Umar and certain other bloggers share their opinions and experiences and put themselves out there while they are commenting on current events. I could probably stand to get more personal without entering into Fruit Loops territory.
On the other hand, Third Resurrection is getting off to a good start. The members are great. InshaAllah, we'll keep it going for a while and will be a positive experience.
What do y'all think? What's your ideal blog like? If you have a blog, what are you tring to accomplish with it?
tuesday i had fruit loops
2 comments:
I am trying to save the world with my blog. seriously. ;-)
I think that for me the biggest reason I started a blog was to find a community--at the time, I was at the University of Michigan, and I would say out of a million students there, I was the only over thirty Chicana with two kids and a husband attending the school. It was a very lonely school for me, and Ann Arbor was a very lonely place--So I started blogging to see if there might be other radical women of color in the same position as me, and I have found quite a few. Since I have found these amazing women, just because activism is so much a part of my life, it was then that I started wondering how we could be using the internet to do what we were already doing in the real world...So that is largely what my blog is--a place to center women of color, activism, and all the amazing, scary, intense, fun things that we experience.
But first and foremost, my blog was a place for me to deal with the loneliness of a very isolating and miserable place.
It is extremely interesting for me to read the article. Thank you for it. I like such themes and anything that is connected to this matter. I would like to read more on that blog soon.
Post a Comment