There are no words to describe the tragedy that happened yesterday in Boston. I was not there and I am not a runner. But I am an athlete and my friends are athletes. I have gone to their events and sat in the stands, cheering them on, anxiously waiting for them to finish. As I watch the news and wait for truth to unfold, I think same thoughts as the rest of the nation.

This morning, Scott Poole, a poet who I deeply respect and had the opportunity to work for in the past, posted this poem on Facebook hoping that someone from Boston would see it and his words would help them heal. Through the magic of social media, his poem caught the attention of Boston’s NPR station, WBUR, and they’ve asked him to read it tomorrow on their show Here and Now. And it is my pleasure to share it with you.

Thinking of Boston.

To Run

a prayer for Boston by Scott Poole

To run
is to rise above the weak spirit
is to take on pain
is to push pain in the chest
with both palms

stumbling over garbage,
gravel, fragments of life,

is to say I will take you
on in the street.
Every breath of mine
is a battering ram,

shoving, crushing,
swinging a hammer of air.

I am a body of fast moving blood
inhaling you
taking you in like a tank.
I will consume your hate.

I will run straight into you
as if you were a finish line of joy,
picking up the fallen along the way
and you will never stop me,
you will never
stop me.

Image via Live Wire Radio

Two weeks ago, my blog turned three. And I celebrated the occasion with a tweet and a Facebook post and intentions to publish the post that I’m writing right now. And here we are.

In the first year, I published 55 blogs. In the second year, 59 blogs. And in the third year. I published 30 blog posts. And yet, the third year was one of the best years in my blog’s history because of two separate, but connected events – speaking at WordCamp Seattle and WordCamp Portland.

I started this blog to find my voice and have a place to write. But it quickly turned into a hub around connecting with people. From random conversations with people I meet on Twitter to coffee shop dates with bloggers I admire, or three-degrees of separation that turn into job offers, most of the people I have met over the past three years have been connected to this blog and the doors that it has opened to me. And for all of the specific and vague connections I have made over the past three years, I am grateful.

My blog’s third year started off with more momentum, posts, and excitement than I could imagine. But after the second speaking event at the end of summer, everything went into a quiet hiatus. I still wrote and published blogs, but things slowed way down over here as I focused my creative energy into a new fulltime job I started in September. But when I look at the past year as a whole and ignore my goal of publishing more posts than I had in the previous year, my blog’s third year was a momentous one.

And to commemorate its birthday, here’s a little roundup of lessons learned, best posts, and the random ways that people find my blog.

The Three Most Important Lessons I’ve learned in Three Years of Blogging

1. You never have enough time to blog as you want to. I laughed when putting together my slides about blogging every day because I knew someone would ask, “How do you find the time to blog?” and the answer I prepared the following answer: you just do.  For whatever reason, this fall I really understood what it meant to not have enough time to do anything other than go to work, eat, and barely get enough sleep to be energized to tackle the next day. I’ve had fulltime jobs before, but the one I started was different and I could not (still cannot) explain why. And while, for the first time in my life, I’m happy going through the motions and just being that person who goes to work and comes home, the writer inside of me is aching to write more. And the only way to satisfy her is to steal that time from somewhere else and, sit down, shut up, and pound the keyboard until words appear.

2. The post you pour your heart and soul into writing will never resonate with readers as much as the one you write and publish in the moment. There is a time and a place for epic blog posts that you spend hours researching, writing, editing, and perfecting. And while it feels good to write those essays, when it comes to blogs and writing content that people (you) care about, are posts that are written in an hour’s notice based on the ideas that you’ve been chewing on over the past few days. Stop thinking. Start writing.

3. Numbers alone don’t measure success. I’ve been struggling to write this recap and feel good about my third year of blogging because I haven’t been blogging lately. I didn’t blog every day in November. And I didn’t post at all in December. But when I think about all the people I have met and the opportunities I have had because of the work I have put into my blog since the beginning, it has been a damn successful year. 

My Third Year of Blogging

Since launching this blog, I have published 144 posts, received 893 comments, and there have been 44,947 views to my site. I have received four job offers because of the work I have done on this blog (and in social media). And I have booked two solo speaking events and one guest lecture at a university. And people still aren’t sure how to pronounce lamiki.

Milestone Posts from the Archives

• First blog post: Fear is a Four Letter Word
• NaBloPoMo 2010 recap: What I Learned: When Creativity Flows, Don’t Turn Off the Faucet
• First birthday post: First Not the End: Lamiki Turns One!
• NaBloPoMo 2011 recap: NaBloPoMo Goals and Milestones
• Second birthday post: Happy Second Blogiversary, lamiki!

Most Popular Blog Posts this Year

• Flat Stanley Gets Mailed to Seattle
• In Observance of Date Night
• Nobody Tells This to Beginners (and Other Developments)
• Sunday Serial: Defending Disney Princesses
• How to Blog Every Day: Slides and Resources from WordCamp Portland 

Posts I’m Most Proud of Writing

• A Writer’s Love Letter to Other Writers
• What Happens After You Speak at a Conference
• How to Blog Every Day (including the video of my talk and the deck)
• How to Promote Your Blog Without Losing Your Soul (video of my talk, resources, and slides)
• What Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein Have to do with Success

Posts I had the Most Fun Writing

• A Social Media Nightmare (a collaboration with my talented husband for my own birthday)
• When do you become a local Seattleite?
• How to Increase Traffic to Your Blog by Using Ryan Gosling 

Top Search Terms

• hipster love
• flat stanley letter
• ryan gosling crossfit
• disney princesses facebook
• procrastination flowchart

Most Interesting Search Terms

• proof of pregnancy letter (again, I have no idea what this means)
• if disney princesses had Facebook
• egg roll meme (anyone care to shine light on this one?)
• procrastination algorithm
• memories destroy us
• born to be wild woman
• a man will always have what he cant have quote

What’s coming this year?

More writing. As I already declared, this is the year that I will write more. I struggled to write this blog post and not be upset for the fact that I haven’t blogged much over the past few months, even though I know what I’ve been doing with my time. But as a perfectionist, I always want more.

If you’ve been here since the beginning, thank you. If you’re new here, welcome, and thank you for reading. The best part about having a personal blog is that it can (and will) grow with the writer. The purpose that this blog filled when it first launched has changed. And the purpose that it’s going to fill in the near future is still to be determined. Either way, it’s going to be a fun ride.

Happy third birthday, lamiki! Now, where’s my cake?

Photo via craftapalooza

Editor’s Note: I realize it’s the last week of January and it’s a tad tacky to post my “year in review” blog post. But do you know what’s even tackier than that? Publishing a year-in-review blog post in February.

Days before the clock struck midnight and we rang in a New Year, I sat on Skype having a conversation with a dear friend about anything and everything that happened in the year that the world did not end. In the middle of the call, my husband dropped in and showed off the framed piece of artwork he illustrated for our nephew. This piece he drew, brushed, and water colored in his studio on a desk that he didn’t imagine owning a year ago. But over the past year, it has been the location where his best work has come to life.

Back on the call, my friend described the successes and detours his business had throughout the past year; a business that was a glimmer of an idea less than two years before. Then I connected the dots that lead me to the day job that I’m so fortunate to have landed, happy to be at, and invested in today.

At the end of my story said the something that I’ve been repeating over and over to myself as I entered the New Year: How did we get here?

Every year when holidays settle down and the clock runs out, I try to reflect on how I started the previous year and how it ultimately ended. It’s at this point when I see the things that were such a struggle, the moments that were absolutely wretched, and the moments when everything happened for a reason and the stress was totally worth it.

2012 was—without a doubt—a crazy year. As I look back on my 2011 year in review, I had no idea how completely different life would be a year later due to things that were beyond my control. I knew the year would take it’s own shape, so I said “no” to resolutions and framed the year around goals, mantras, and priorities. But as the note cards lost their adhesion, goals literally fell off the wall, and life marched on. But unlike last year that ended with me feeling disappointed that things didn’t go as planned, this year I’m okay with that 2012 had a different ending than how it began.

2012 Year in Review

Like last year, I used the annual review template from Benny Hsu of the blog, Get Busy Living, to reflect on everything that happened in 2012 and map out my goals for 2013. It’s a great tool that I recommend for reflecting on the past year. Here are some highlights from my year in review:

 Five of the greatest things that happened in the past year:

1. First solo speaking event
2. Got my first unassisted kipping pull-up at CrossFit
3. Amazing writing/blogging weekend with a girlfriend down in Portland (oh, and second solo speaking event too!)
4. Celebrated my fifth wedding anniversary
5. Joined HTC’s social team

 Three great lessons I’ve learned from the past year are:

1. Working hard and hustling pays off.
2. If putting myself out on a limb scares me, I’m doing it right.
3. People always have an agenda and what they say is a part of the truth, but not the whole truth.

 Three personal developments I have made in the past year are:

1. Learning how to be freaked out on the inside and calm on the outside
2. Patience and persistence pays off
3. Having confidence in what I “know”

Three things I need to do less of in the next year are:

1. Hustling
2. Working myself thin
3. Thinking that the world will end if I don’t get something done.

Three things I need to do more of in the next year are:

1. Writing for myself (fiction or creative nonfiction)
2. Spend quality time with the people who matter the most: my husband, friends, and family
3. Working towards the next step in my career (vs. towards the next job)

Three things I need to stop completely doing in the next year are:

1. Losing sleep
2. Feeling bad if I’m not interested in something anymore
3. Spending time and energy on people and doing things that don’t really matter to me

One Sentence that sums up this past year: How did we get here?

Even though January is over and the allure of the New Year has waned, 2013, I’m ready to approach you differently. And I’m excited to see how it all turns out.

Museums are not places that we go to be entertained, they are places that we go to come together and discuss ideas. They exist to make us think.

Wendy Simons, a docent at the Seattle Art Museum, said a version of the above at the end of our tour. A few weeks ago, the Seattle Art Museum invited a group of bloggers to the museum for a preview and a guided tour of Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou, Paris exhibit. Elles at the Seattle Art Museum features more than 125 works of art made by 75 women artists from 1909 to 2007 and through their work reveals a history of 20th and 21st century art from a perspective that we’ve never seen before, women. And this exhibit is a fraction of the 500 pieces that were part of the original exhibit at the Pompidou in Paris, France.

Before Elles first appeared in at the Pompidou from May 2009 to March 2011, art by women were never part of discourse on the history of art and culture. Think back to when you were in school and learned the names of Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gaguin, and many other artists of the 20^th century. Did you ever stop to ask why there wasn’t a single female artist included in those lessons?

It wasn’t that women weren’t creating art during this time. They were painting; we just didn’t know their names.

Elles exists to change that and show how the twentieth century looked through the eyes of women like Natalia Gontcharova, Tamara de Lempicka, Suzanne Valadon, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Hannah Wilke, Dora Maar, Diane Arbus, and many more. Names that I didn’t know until I saw their art for the first time at the Seattle Art Museum.

Learning How to Experience Art with Elles 

Jeune fille en vert (Young Girl in Green), 1927 – 30, Oli on plywood, Tamara de Lempicka

I’ve toured to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia and the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. I have gazed into the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, paid my respects to La Pietà, and met Michelangelo’s David up-close. While these works of art were incredible, none of them moved me.

The problem with famous works of art is when you see it in person, it’s quite underwhelming because you’ve grown up seeing reproductions your entire life. We are also taught the histories of these pieces in school. We know about the struggles that each one represents and the political and cultural states that existed as they were created. So we were never invited to arrive at our own conclusions of them. We were never taught how to experience art.

As I toured Elles with a group of other women bloggers, together we experienced the twentieth century through the eyes of artists that we had never heard or heard of before. We began in the late twentieth century when women were beginning to question family roles and see the world through their own eyes and consciousness. As we moved towards the middle of the century, the pieces became edgier as the artists collided with the feminist movement and the political instability of the 1960s and 1970s. As the content of their work changed, so did the mediums. Art was no longer restricted to painting and sculpture, but now included photography, performance, and video.

The further we moved into the depths of Elles and through history, the more their art challenged me.

Espagnoles (Spaniards), 1920-1924, Oil on canvas, Natalia Gontcharova

In college I discovered feminism and decided that I never wanted to be trapped by a glass ceiling. As an adult, I have met some of the strongest, bravest women who have done incredible things because of and despite of their gender. I have learned that women can’t have it all, that some women can, and the majority of us are still trying to figure out what that “it” is. At times I am reminded that I am one of the only women on my team not by other women, but by men. At times I realize that gender isn’t really an issue any more, while other times it is painstakingly obvious that it still is.

As I stared through the eyes of the women of Elles, it was the first time in my life that I realized how much we live in a man’s world. Even the fact that this exhibit was created to highlight women artists of the twentieth century shows how much women are not part of history at all. It makes me wonder, what would this exhibit have looked like if these pieces were in an exhibit with art created by men of the same period? Would the women of Elles have had the same impact on me?

Elles:Pompidou Makes You Think

La Chambre Bleue (The Blue Room), 1923, Oil on canvas, Suzanne Valadon

The only way to answer any of these questions is to go see the exhibit and let yourself start those conversations.

Like I said, this exhibit challenged me. Not because their work was shocking, though some pieces did (by the way, Elles was designed for a mature audience). But because of how I am experiencing my own world. Your experience of Elles will be different that mine, and you will be better for it.

When you do go – and you should – open your mind and your heart and experience everything that you see. Allow yourself to process every piece and start a conversation with yourself and whoever goes with you about what you see and what you feel. Also, go on a guided tour so that the docent can fill you in on the histories of each piece. The placards and text signs alone next to artwork do not do it justice.

Have you ever gone to an art exhibit that affected you in a way that you weren’t expecting it to?

Untitled (What big muscles you have!), 1986, Self-adhesive strips and letraset on acrylic panel, Barbara Kruger American

Elles:Pompidou at the Seattle Art Museum is the only U.S. venue for this groundbreaking exhibition that tells a story of modern and contemporary art solely through the work of women artists. This exhibit runs now through January 13, 2012. Thank you, Seattle Art Museum, for inviting me to experience Elles! 

All photos of the artwork were taken with permission from the museum. 

I received this email from SlideShare* last month, congratulating my slides for reaching 10,000 views!

Woah, that’s amazing! I’d say that the presentations I gave at WordCamp Seattle and WordCamp Portland have been two of the most rewarding things that I’ve done in the past few months. For one thing, I was able to talk about two things that I’m super passionate about —marketing and blogging — to an audience of people who are passionate about creating content or enabling content creators. Plus, I was able to meet new people and have an amazing weekend with a close friend in Portland.

Okay, all that gushing aside, yesterday I released the video of How to Blog Every Day.

Now that your blogging chops are primed, here’s the video on How to Promote Your Blog Without Losing Your Soul from WordCamp Seattle back in May.

*The SlideShare content team does an amazing job communicating with their content creators. For example, they emailed me to let me know my deck was featured on their homepage. Another bonus point for them: emoticons in the subject line; how can I not be excited about that?!

Video of my talk, How to Promote Your Blog, at WordCamp Seattle

This presentation is packed with information and tactics that you can use today to promote your blog posts today. I outline how to build a community for your blog online, which social networks to use to amplify and promote your posts, and which social media networks you should concentrate on including where to post, when, how, and why.

This will either make your life easier, or increase your to-do list infinitely. And you thought writing blog posts was the hardest part.

The presentation lasts 24 minutes and the next 17 minutes is mic’ed Q&A (which means you can actually hear the questions!).

Sorry about the dim lighting and if it’s hard to hear me, while I was incredibly nervous to be giving my first solo presentation, I was also recovering from a cold and my throat really wanted to close up on me (super annoying when you want to talk, for like, 45 minutes!). Slides are embedded below and you’re welcome to download and share them!

Related links and resources:

• How to Promote Your Blog Checklist
• What I learned from speaking at my first conference

Did this presentation help you promote your blog?

My goal when giving a talk is to give you one thing that you can take away and apply to your own work. If this presentation helped you come up with one way to promote your blog, I’d love to hear about it, either in the comments or via email.

If you missed the video on How to Blog Every Day, head on over there and check it out!

UPDATE: This talk was chosen by WordPress.tv as one of the most popular videos from 2012!

We all need a little push to get the creative juices going and, you know, write.

Two years ago a friend of mine came up with a crazy idea to blog every single day. It was a way to get both of us writing on a consistent basis. And it worked so well that every November I commit to writing and publishing a blog post every single day.

That experiment worked so well for me that I talked about it at WordCamp Portland last month. And guess what? The video from my talk, How to Blog Every Day, is now available!

Video of my talk, How to Blog Every Day, at WordCamp Portland

The talk lasts about 36 minutes, and is packed with ideas to help get you writing—either every day or simply every week. I’m embedding the video and the slides for you below (feel free to download and share). Once you’re finished watching the video, be sure to check out the extensive list of resources that were published with the original slides.

There was some great un-mic-ed discussion at the end of my talk during the Q&A, so and I tried to repeat anything that was said off-screen, but I apologize if there’s something you miss!

Thank you to Blaze Streaming Media for recording the video!

Want to blog every day and need ideas?

Here are two ideas that will help get you writing:

The Daily Post – A project from WordPress.com filled with ideas, prompts, and even writing challenges with the soul purpose to keep bloggers blogging.

Join a daily blogging challenge – Every once in a while an organization will start a month-long writing series where they will release prompts daily and invite bloggers to write about it. It’s a great way to give you ideas of what to write. You can either search out a new writing series or check out prompts from the archives of past writing events. For example, check out the prompts from Trust30 and Reverb11 to get started (links go to the archives).

If you’re interested in blogging every day this November (or any month), leave a comment with a link to your blog! I’m collecting a small team of daily bloggers and want to follow you, too!

Next up, the video from my presentation at WordCamp Seattle, How to Promote Your Blog Without Losing Your Soul.

When I was twelve, I wrote down this quote from Marilyn Monroe:

I was never told that I was beautiful when I was younger. I think that all young girls should be told that they are beautiful even if they really aren’t.

And ever since then, I’ve heard her words in my head. I, too, believe that every little girl should be told that she’s beautiful. But I disagree with Ms. Monroe that little girls are not beautiful. When you’re little, the world is yours to take and create. You can achieve whatever you set your mind to, and you can do whatever you want to do.

Last week I read this correspondence between Albert Einstein and a little girl who wanted to be a scientist. In it, he gave her the best advice that every woman can apply to her career and anything that she sets her mind to.

As a woman, I encounter so many articles about women in work and the role gender plays in success. I have been part of conversations about how to we need more women in the tech field, how brogrammers have created a world that is challenging to play in, and that women still can’t have it all.

As a member of Gen Y, we know that the world that we’re working in now is way different than every other generation that came before us. The majority of us are working jobs that did not exist 10 years ago or even before we had them. We see work as an activity, not a place we spend our days. And most of us have a side-hustle, hobby, or passion project that we created ourselves and devote time beyond the 9-to-5 building.

And even though we’ve been accused for being the cheapest generation, we’re working hard, despite the horrible economy, to build a life that we want. And we’re filling it with the people, experiences, and the things that we desire.

We were raised to believe that if we want something bad enough, all we have to do is work hard and we can do it. And we’re very aware that we can’t do it alone, because if we could, we wouldn’t want to.

Marilyn Monroe wants every girl to know that she’s beautiful, whether she is or is not. Gen Y has was raised to believe that we could do anything that we set our minds to.

But as we get further and further into our version of adulthood, we realize that we can’t have everything that we want, when we want it. We get confused after reading articles that tell us that women keep other women from getting ahead at the same time that others tell us that women can be our closest allies. We aren’t sure what to think. We forget the hopes and dreams that we secretly scribbled into notebooks when we were teenagers. We get consumed in the struggle.

A friend says the right words, at the right time. They pass us a book that brings us back to where we need to be. Someone throws us a life vest and we read something that was written for what we’re experiencing in that very moment.

We realize what Einstein was right—who we are and what we want to be is possible, and not to let something that we can’t control, like being young, a woman, inexperienced, or something else, get in our way.

In our world, non-beautiful girls can be beautiful and little girls can grow up to be scientists. Rules and expectations were set by the generations who came before us. And they created their definition of success.

This is our world, and success is what we make of if.

Photograph by Elliott Erwitt via Mycroft Books

In the summer of 2004, my best friend and I were waiting in line to get into a concert when a woman with a clipboard walked up to us and asked, “Are you registered to vote?” Both of us replied with extreme pride, “Yes, we are!”

We were 18, had just graduated from high school, and we were going to vote in our first Presidential election that fall.

In 2008, my husband and I made “Hope Chili” and watched TV as states turned blue and red from East to West. It was early on the West Coast when my aunt texted me from Grant Park in Chicago where she and her family watched our new President accept America’s vote.

It’s 2012, and another Presidential election is right around the corner. Now that both candidates have accepted their party’s nomination, it’s time to make sure your own paperwork is in order.

If you don’t register to vote, you can’t vote

I don’t care which side of the issues you stand on, but if you don’t vote, then you don’t have an opinion on any of them.

Register to vote today to make sure that you do.

If you’re in college, register to vote at your home address as an absentee. This election is more than who will be the leader of the U.S.; it is also about electing people to represent decisions that will be made for you in the place that you call “home.” Decisions like how much those teachers who inspired you and helped you get to where you are will be paid. Decisions like if your local fire district will have the resources to.

The last day to register to vote in the General Election is early October 2012 and the actual date varies by state. So get your act in gear and register to vote today. (If you live in Washington State, you can register to vote via Facebook.)

Make our forefathers and foremothers proud. Exercise your freedom to have a choice and a voice.

Illustration by John Kimball

Two years ago at SXSW I met two people in real life for the first time. After meeting each other, we didn’t have that awkward “getting to know you” phase, instead we were chained to the hip debriefing about sessions and mapping out how each of us were going to make our impact in the world. When we’d meet new people and they asked how we met, we’d answer simultaneously, “On Twitter!”

“You mean you didn’t just meet here?”

Well, sorta. You see, the three of us had been talking for two years online and SXSW happened to be the first time that we were all in the same physical room together.

We joked that we were “IRL-ing,” which is the active verb of spending time “in real life” together as opposed to online. And it was fun, too.

Think about the closest friends that you have, the ones that you can share anything with. Now think about how long it took you to get to that point of comfort with your friend. Years, probably.

Friends vs. Friendship

Yesterday, Monica Guzman wrote about the term “friends” and how in the age of social media, are all of the “friends” that we have online actually friends, or just people we know who we call friends?

She writes about the difference between friends and the role of friendship:

How many people can I turn to in a crisis? A small group of family and close friends I’d think to reach out to — if I keep the trouble offline.

But if I take it online, if I decide that’s all right, it’s all of them plus an unpredictable number of other friends, acquaintances, professional contacts and even strangers who might help, maybe more quickly or more effectively than the people I know and see the most.

These tech-connected “friends” won’t ever replace the flesh-and-blood people with whom we form deep, enduring relationships. But they can act the part a time or two, and even audition for a permanent role….

So are people friends if they act like friends for a moment here, an hour there? Can we draw clean lines between our networks and our friends once and for all?

No, we can’t, and maybe we shouldn’t. Because when we’re so connected, the prevalence of friends doesn’t matter nearly as much as the prevalence of friendship.

The question about if a person is really a friend or not is something that we’ve all wondered for years (just ask any heart-broken teenager). But are the conversations and relationships we have and build online real or not?

Stop Valuing IRL Over Your Online Life

My friend Mouyyad of IRL-ing fame sent me this video of Alexandra Samuel’s talk at TEDxVictoria in which she gives Ten Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life (video embedded below). She says:

We are so used to apologizing for our online reality that we actually have an acronym for it: I. R. L., in real life. And you see people all over the Internet itself using this acronym to say, ‘What I’m doing right now online does not count. It’s not real. Reality happens elsewhere.

Wait, so that conversation that I had with someone last week on Twitter that turned into a freelance project wasn’t real? And the person who I met two years ago online who’s turned into one of my closest most trusted friends, isn’t real?

Alexandra’s talk is centered on the idea of “Real Life Too,” a new acronym to embrace and properly recognize all those activities that we do online as being real.

That anonymous person who left a hateful comment on your blog? They’re real. That blogger you’ve been connecting with who lives on the other side of the world? They’re real. That person who lives in your same city who you’ve tweeted with at events but have never shook hands? They’re real, too.

Alexandra Samuel: Ten Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life at TEDxVictoria

I still love the term “IRL” because to the friends who I have IRL-ed with, it’s a joke. After building up trust and being our real selves with each other online for years, we were able to skip the awkwardness that comes with meeting people for the first time and jump right into being “friends.” We know that where our friendship started, online, is as real as what happens offline.

I think about all of the “friends” I have on Facebook and how many of them I’m actually friends with, care about, or are just “friends” with because I’m curious to watch what they do in their life. All of that is real, and just because the interactions that we have with each other happen online doesn’t make it any less real.

What do you think, is online life as real as offline life?

Photo by eflon

Today I had the pleasure of “hanging out” on Google+ as part of StrengthsTalk, which is show for StrengthsFactors.

Our host was Will Deyamport, III of StrengthsFactors and peoplegogy and participants included Krystle Rory of Kriss Did It, Leah Olson of LeahROlson.com (who I got to meet this past weekend down at WordCamp!), and yours truly.

Bloggers Talking about Blogging

Our topic was about all things blogging — why we started blogging, what platform we blog on, do we self-identify as a blogger, how we find time to blog, and tips for people who want to blog.

The hang out is 32 minutes long, and if you’re interested in blogging, I highly recommend that you watch it (and, of course, I am a tad bias).

What tips do we have for people who are considering blogging?

Blog about what you’re passionate about. Don’t blog for money, that hardly ever works out. When you blog about what you’re passionate about, blogging is not easy, but it does take a lot of time and dedication. – Krystle

Don’t blog because everyone else is blogging. If this is something that you want to do, do it. If you want to start blogging because everyone else is doing it, don’t. – Laura

Don’t feel intimidated by blogging. It is putting your writing and your thoughts out there, but it doesn’t have the same formality as putting your writing into a newspaper or a magazine. – Leah

Best takeaway from Krystle about when she blogs: “When life happens, I blog.”

I want that on a t-shirt.

Many thanks to Will for inviting me to be part of this hangout and thank you to Leah for giving a shout-out to my WordCamp talk on How to Blog Every Day.

Why do you blog?