My RSS feed is filled with dozens of amazing blogs. Some of them belong to friends of mine, but many more are written by people I’ve never met and don’t know at all outside of what they post about themselves on their sites.
Lately I’ve been thinking about what people do and don’t blog about. The sites I follow talk about everything from science news to snapshots of cute animals to the online diaries of foster and adoptive parents. Some of these blogs reveal a ton of information about the person writing them. Others give away virtually no hints about the bloggers and their personal lives at all.
Regardless of what type of site it is, though, there are a few things I wish I could find more often in all of the blogs I follow.
- Stories about their bad days. I completely understand wanting to keep certain things private, but I really like reading the occasional post about what other people find frustrating or difficult in life. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses. If we share the same weaknesses, I can learn new coping skills for the things that I have trouble doing. Reading about the things people struggle with also gives me sympathy for how hard they work to accomplish something that I or you have always pulled off effortlessly.
- Responses to other blog posts. It is so interesting to see a blog post spawn one or more responses to it. Your interpretation of a discussion could be completely different from mine, but I won’t know why you think the way you do unless you tell everyone about it. In some cases, I also haven’t even heard of the original debate or controversy yet. If a blogger I follow doesn’t mention it and it’s not something that’s covered in the mainstream news, I might not know about it for a long time.
- Funny stories. While it’s true that not every blog is well-suited for these kinds of posts, I love seeing them show up in my RSS feed. Sometimes the best way to respond to an impossible problem is to find the humour in it. This isn’t something that comes to me naturally, so I really enjoy seeing how other people pull it off.
- Updates to previous posts. What someone believed six months (or six years) ago might not be what they still believe today. It’s so interesting to me to read about how and why a person’s mind changes over time.
- Off-topic posts. If your blog advertisers itself to be about underwater basket weaving, I’d prefer to be reading about stuff related to weaving and underwater adventures 90% of the time. Occasional off-topic posts can be a fascinating glimpse into the author’s life, though.
What topics do you wish more blogs talked about?
Intriguing ideas to blog about, Lydia. I like your reasoning behind the ideas, and will have to incorporate these more often in my own blog.
Thank you!