Subtlety in Blogging

Blogging is an incredible creature. Yes I may well have a biased view on this topic since I've had a blog in my life for quite a while now but I think that my opener encapsulates the general consensus amongst fellow bloggers and blog readers alike. Blogs are very flexible, they can be accessed by anyone on the internet and the content can appeal to so many different types of people. 

When I started out I thought about starting up a 'marmite' blog where the topic of the posts would be very focused and would only appeal to the minority. In many respects this blog that you find yourself on today is testament to the fact that I chose to make this blog appeal to as many people as possible. I might well have shot myself in the foot with that decision because now I write one of millions of 'generic' blogs on the internet and therefore it is hard to get readers. This blog (contrary to the title) isn't even exclusively for teenagers either - it's hard to come up with a unique selling point. Those negatives aside however, I get to write about anything I want to. It's a great thing to be able to play around with because, despite it being generic, I know my audience (damn, I know most of my readers) and therefore I can pitch my posts at them and see what they think. The only problem with this (and yes, I'm being a little negative today but I'm slightly hungover) is that I have to try and be subtle when it comes to writing about things that relate to people I know. I don't name names and I don't act as a news-broadcaster for people's lives - I just put down my take on an event, nothing more nothing less.

A Dreaming Psycho

How often do you remember your dreams? I think that I'm lucky if I can remember (even parts of) mine twice in the space of about two weeks. I know people that can trot theirs off from start to finish and it makes me slightly jealous - until recently anyway. I had a dream a couple of weeks back that really creeped me out and put me off wanting to remember my dreams so much. Below I'll give a brief description as to what happened and how I felt when I woke up and then, if you haven't closed your browser by that point, I'm going to see if this reflection has helped. I've heard that you should write your dreams down when they are still fresh in your memory because over time it builds up a picture of your subconscious. I think that my notebook would be a very slim volume with a few less than savory reminders of my night-time wonderings.

The Internet: The Third Arm of Society

You learn a lot about people when you travel. I'm not talking about the people that you are traveling with in particular because you are bound to get to know them better; I mean the people that you encounter along the way. Traveling appeals to lots of different types of people and therefore when you stay in hostels all over Europe you get to see a very clean cross-section of the 'world society'. Anyone who has ever been in a hostel (either at home or abroad) will understand the kind of mix of people that can be found in places like that - it's all very interesting. One of the main things that I observed about these people when I was on holiday was that they all had one thing in common: they all wanted access to the internet. No matter what type of person it was or where they were from, everyone hovered around the computers in the hostel until there was one free. Most of them were looking for their fix of Facebook but no matter what they wanted to do online it struck me that whatever it was, it was vital. It brought me to the conclusion that most people (particularly young people) can't live without access to the internet for longer than a few days. I'm no different and I knew that I was going to struggle but it's nice to know that I'm one many who need to have the internet at their fingertips whenever they desire it.

Too Much to Learn? Deal With It

It's Monday and I'm me; there is not much else for it than to write a 'Me on Monday' post! After well over a month of eerie silence and wasted opportunities, I'm back for good this time and hopefully the coming weeks and months are going to prove fruitful on the blogging front. Today's post is regarding something that niggles away at me almost every single day of my life. It's a problem that I'm sure I'm not alone with and one that is probably most overt in our teenage years. The problem that I'm talking about is 'choosing' what you are going to learn. Obviously we don't get the choice with a lot of things (we're told what to learn at school and that is that) but then there are those extra-curricular things - the things that make us who we are. Now I've written much on this topic in the past including this post which in which I list the things that I want to learn to do - safe to say that not much of it has been learned in the 6 months since I wrote it. It's not even a case of me not wanting to (of course I do) but when I think about all of the things that I want to do with my spare time I get bogged down and end up doing nothing. This is not the wisest way forward and I'll never learn anything new at this rate. Hopefully this post might help to remedy the situation.