Before creating this blog, I looked for some information on blogging and found a very interesting infographic by Blogging.org titled the State of the Blogging World in 2012. According to the graphic, there are about 31 million bloggers in the US alone, 43% of bloggers use WordPress as their blogging platform and 35% use Blogger, and 60% of businesses have a company blog. Personal blogging is not about the money: Only 8% of bloggers earn enough money with their blogs to support a family. In the blogging world, English is the first language: 66% of blogs are in English, followed 8.7% in Spanish.

I really liked Andrew Sullivan’s quote, posted by Dean in Module I, about blogging being “to writing what extreme sports are to athletics:… less formal, more alive”; “writing out loud” he called it. Although I loved that concept of blogging and I can understand Sullivan’s sentiment to some extent, it’s hard for me to engage in the same way. I enjoy reading other people’s blogs, but I don’t like publicly sharing my own thoughts; I prefer face-to-face conversation, small gatherings where you can talk about anything you want because you know your “audience”. When it comes to blogs, I like the idea of being backstage watching other people having strong discussions online, but I really wouldn’t want to get involved. I guess it can be exhilarating to have people you’ve never met commenting on something you said, feeling that you have created a wave of energy and activity with your ideas (even having some “likes” on Facebook is sometimes exciting), but I can only imagine the shock of getting a bad comment to something you posted online for everyone to see. I think I would be tossing and turning all night after such a thing, thinking about what I wrote and regretting the public display for many months to come!