Thursday, May 04, 2006
Starting out
Now that I have food in my stomach, I can actually have coherent thoughts. T posted about blog friends and how some people are all whiny that nobody likes them because they get no comments. I’d like to address this by telling the story of how I got started. People who have just started their blog need to know what others have gone through to make blog friends, so this will also double as a public service announcement.
When I first started this thing I had the sense to realize that nobody knew I existed, so of course I wasn’t going to be getting comments. Some folks like Di found me quite by accident while randomly clicking through Blogger sites. Others like Zoe found me while searching for other lesbians.
Most everyone else decided to peek at my site after I sought them out first. Like Zoe, I decided to search for others like myself, so I did a simple Blogger search on the word “lesbian”. That’s when I found One Lazy Lesbian and Suburban Lesbian. I started there. I loved what they had to say and started littering them with comments. Pretty soon they started reading about what else I had to say and I started getting comments myself.
Of course two blogs aren’t enough, so I sifted through their blogrolls. That’s what opened the door to the rest of the blog world. Of course I didn’t like all the blogs they liked, but I liked quite a few of them. So I branched out and started becoming a regular on various sites. Many of them, in turn, became my regulars as well because our personalities were compatible.
It takes time though. Like in real life, people won’t warm up to you instantly. One comment doesn’t make you someone’s friend. Sincerity matters. Reading someone’s blog is a serious investment of time, and people don’t like to waste time. So if you present yourself as a sincerely interested person, the interest will likely be reciprocated. Otherwise, why would they waste time to go check out a complete stranger?
So you whiners better quit your griping about cliques. We were all outsiders once.
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