Change

Blogging has been quite an experience for me. I basically started out of a nostalgia for a time when my closest friends were actually quite far away but I talked to them on my computer more or less all the time. The magic that was Section 17 for me (in the early days anyway) has never been really duplicated. I have since met many wonderful people online and made other friends, spouses and everything in between online. But I've never again had that wide circle of far away friends whose daily messages make them seem a part of my life when they are not there. And when I realized that the final two people of that great group friendship that I could keep up with, were mainly (sorry, couldn't resist) keep-up-with-able because they now blogged about their daily lives and it was so cool to hear from and talk to them regularly that I decided to just jump in.

I have always been a book person. I've been a voracious reader since the moment I learned How, I've worked 3 1/2 years in the retail book business sucessfully selling books I've read and recommended to customers. I now work in a job where I am constantly exposed to thousands and thousands of books every working day. So I gave my blog a book theme. Thinking that I would just talk about books when the mood struck and mainly give the kinds of personal updates I once would have posted in issues. And so I mostly did.

And then it happened. I started noticing that there were actually people reading my book reviews who weren't just the handful of personal friends I'd been missing but people who just came in to read the review. (Oddly the review I posted of Dishwasher has been read a lot. It appears that because my blog is called The Thin Red Line people searching for GE Thin Dishwasher get my book review on their first page. And a very surprising number of them click through and read it.

So I started tying to actively promote my blog. I joined two syndication services. In return for displaying headlines (blog post titles) from other bloggers on my blog, my headlines are in turn displayed on other blogs with similar topic areas. I also began the long, tedious process of registering my blog with all of the blog directories (you'd be surprised how many there are).

I recently got an extremely helpful review from James Bashkin on Blog Catalog, who basically told me that my book reviews were quite good but that the personal was so Very personal as to be a off-putting.

After some thought I have decided to migrate my personal day to day shit postings exclusively to my Purely Personal blog, to migrate Joel's fabulous pictures to my Joel's Pix blog and focus The Thin Red Line on regularly posting about three interesting books, aiming to provide readers with an introduction to books they many not be familiar with, rather than anything approaching the detailed critique of a full review. My goal at this point is simply to gain readership. I love to write and I want people to read it.

Henceforth please check in here at http://outofit-personal.blogspot.com for what's up with me. The Thin Red Line will soon be more tightly focused on presenting books.