“I think the enemy is self-censorship. In a free society the biggest danger is that you’re afraid to the point where you censor yourself.”

[Tim Robbins ]

One of the things which struck me on my nocturnal blog advice wanderings was the number of posts dedicated to finding inspiration for blog posts. From advice for women bloggers to 101 ideas for blog topics lists, they all had one thing in common: their writers had gone meta on their meta.

Think about it for a moment. Imagine you are a blogger, and you’re trying to dream up some ideas for regular posts. It’s an accepted fact that a regular posting schedule is more likely to gain you faithful readers than an irregular one, so the hunt for interesting topics can become a fraught one. So what’s a blogger to do when the well starts to run dry?

Well… how about writing a blog post on finding inspiration for a blog post? In the same way as a writer might pen a novel about a writer who is penning a novel, the stumped blogger who needs something to post about can create his own Möbius strip: a post aimed at stumped bloggers who need something to post about.

I call it ‘going meta on your meta’ and I’m doing it right here. I wanted a subject to blog about, and I got thinking about ‘needing something to blog about’, which led me on my search and finally to this post. You don’t need to wait for divine inspiration to strike. Any writer worth their ink will tell you that’s a surefire way to get everything else done, except writing, and a common piece of advice in books about writing tells you that if you’re not sure what to write about, write about being not sure what to write about. Because at least you’re writing something, even if it is crap.

Of course, you don’t want to write a load of crap for your blog (at least, I hope not!) Even a post dedicated to your fumblings for something to post about can be worth reading, if only for the humour you could inject into your frustrated brain-rummaging. You could surf the net, as I did, find someone else who is talking about blog topics, and add some links to your post o’frustration. Turn that frustration into a post in its own right. Go meta on your meta. Because you can be sure that someone else out there might one day link to your post when they run into the same problem.

Further reading

101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle
The 9 Essential Posts That Every Blogger Should Know
Weblog Tutorials
Blogging With Barbara – Cool Blog Ideas part 1
Blogging With Barbara – Cool Blog Ideas part 2
10 Web Tools To Help Generate Blog Content Ideas
Problogger
North x East

I’ve been reading tonight about personal branding: how you can create an online persona and ‘brand’ for yourself, be it through the kind of web content you offer, or the style of it. And I’ve come to the realisation that even those of us who don’t actively consider our personal brand, do have one, nonetheless.

How many of us are namesquatting on other blogging services? Got a GJ/JF/IJ/LJ/DJ/Blurty/Vox/Wordpress blog that you rarely update, but like to keep, just in case someone else ‘takes’ your name? Yes, if you have a less common internet name that’s less likely to happen, but we still do it, don’t we? But why do we do it? Mainly because we don’t want anyone else using ‘our’ name, because our name represents us online. It’s our personal brand.

Let’s expand that further. Which of these do you have an account at, and are they in ‘your’ main internet persona? – Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other online places where you use the same name, such as a forum etc?

These are all a part of your online persona, of your personal brand. And even though you think, “But I’m just ‘me’ online; there’s no branding!”, think again. You may very well be among those few, but take a step back and look at how you’re writing your next blog entry. Look at how I’m writing this entry. I’m perfectly aware that I’m writing for more than just myself here, that any random surfer might come along and read this or link to it. This isn’t just another, “Oh today I did this and that and blablabla” blog post; this is me writing for a reader, not for myself.

And I’m tailoring my ’style’ accordingly. I’m writing an article here. Rahalia, and Rahalia Cat are now my ‘brand’. They represent me online, and there are times and places where I don’t want to be recognised, or I don’t want the Rahalia brand associated with something else. For example, I wanted to check out MySpace several months back, purely because I knew that great new music could be found there. But I didn’t want all of the more negative aspects of MySpace to be dragged into my main online life. So I created an entirely new persona.

No, I’m not telling you who she is! But she’s out there, and she’s the ‘younger me’ – the punkier, edgy me that is kept well away from the more well-known Rahalia brand. And I’m glad I created her, because she’s my buffer against those weirdo friend requests who might seek me out elsewhere. She has a LiveJournal (as yet unused, but still customised), she blogs occasionally on MySpace, and she has a Gmail account. She’s me, and yet she’s not.

When we flutter in and out of fandoms and interests we sometimes change our names. I wonder sometimes, how many of us are still using the very first name that we gave ourselves when we got online? What was your primary interest when you ‘arrived’ at the internet (those of you that weren’t involved waaaaay back before if got as big as it is now)? For me, it was Formula One, and accordingly I took a name that was F1-related. I’d seen somewhere in a magazine an article about a blogger in Japan (IIRC) calling herself ’slantgirl’ and I liked the way it sounded, so the name that I took blended something F1-ish to the ‘-girl’ suffix.

Rahalia came about when I joined LiveJournal. My F1 name was unavailable, and I was beginning to realise it was unavailable in a lot of places. It was a common name. If I Google for it now I get pages and pages of results, including some that I perhaps wouldn’t want associated with me (one of them listing an interest as ‘mile high club’ – as if!) So at that point, I realised I needed a new name, a new brand. Something unusual. A fandom friend was writing an F1 AU story set in the Star Wars universe and needed a name for a spaceship, along the lines of Millennium Falcon. Since Bobby Rahal was running the Jaguar F1 team, and jaguars are cats, I suggested the Rahalia Cat. This happened shortly before I wanted the new net name, and when I made the decision to change my online ‘brand’ the name of Rahalia Cat was perfect. If you Google for Rahalia the only other results you’ll find that are non-’me’ will be for a place in Morocco of the same name, and a character in what looks like the Smallville or Superman fandoms, plus a couple of random one-off links.

It can be hard to create an entirely new persona online, especially if you’re crossing the streams with people who know the ‘old’ you. Writing style and blogging style are hard to disguise, but it’s possible to view it as a writing challenge, much akin to creating a new character in a novel. Unless you make each character distinctive, they’re going to blend into one seamless blob of grey gloop (and this, I think, might be where the likes of Belle de Jour come from: they’re writing challenges). Sometimes, though, a new personal brand is necessary, whether it’s for professional reasons or more personal ones.

Many of you reading this will have a ‘brand’, simply through what you blog about, through your interests. No matter what information I need, the blogosphere is like a never-ending reference shelf. Everyone has their ’speciality/ies’. You might not actively think about what your specialities are (they could even be as basic, yet necessary, as always posting a comforting hug in a comment when someone is down) but you do have them, and they are all a part of your personal brand. It’s not just a corporate or professional thing; it’s you, as you represent yourself online.

Further reading

The 3 laws of online personal branding (Web Worker Daily)

Why you may need an online persona (Web Worker Daily)

How to build your personal brand online (Web Worker Daily)

Personal branding instant expert (Fast Company)

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. [Mark Twain]

It’s an eerie, yet comforting story.

Link to BBC article

Link to CNN article

I’m afraid I must disagree with her. It’s much more than a book. A whole generation has grown up with Harry Potter. He was there with them at school, he was there when they got their first jobs, he was there during important times in their lives, and perhaps he even helped them to get through those times. He’s been around for ten years now; can you remember what you were doing ten years ago, where you were in your life and how you felt?

I haven’t been caught up in Harry Potter fever, but I can understand the excitement of those who have. I can also understand their annoyance at the idiots who deliberately try to ’spoil’ them for the book. We all have things that we love, and possibly we love them beyond the understanding of those around us. Be it a book series, a movie series, a sport, a hobby; we all have things that have cost us quantities of money that would have others labelling us as obsessive.

But we love those things. They are our passions, and if someone comes along and spoils our passion, then we will rightfully get upset. The Ferrett has a thought-provoking post related to this matter here, in which he writes of a time when he was a child lost in the joy that a small toy gave him, and a group of other children spoiled that moment of joy for him, apparently for no reason:

To this day, I’m not sure whether those kids did me a favor or not. They taught me that there are fuckheads in life who will do their best to make you miserable. If you have a bouncy thing that makes you happy, some people will go out of their way to stomp you down because….

…well, I don’t know why. They just do. But the important thing is that for whatever messed-up reasons they have for doing it, some people will try to push you down. So you’d better shave a slice off of that exhilaration to devote it to protecting the rest of that feeling, because dodging a rock to the head is worth it.

Returning to Harry Potter, the BBC carried an article yesterday about the frenzy leading up to the release of book seven: Growing up with Harry Potter. In it, six fans explain how the books became a part of their lives.

I envy those fans their Midnight Potter Parties (what some in the blogosphere have dubbed ‘Potterdammerung’) with the dressing up and queuing outside bookstores all day and night to get their hands on the final book. I envy them the thrill of finally reading the conclusion to a journey they began ten years ago.

And I envy the feeling of cameraderie that goes along with it, the discussions that will be had afterwards, and the frantic rush to consume as fast as you can, to be the first to blog, “I’ve read it and OMG it’s…”

Harry Potter fans are being urged to sign a petition set up by a book shop chain begging author JK Rowling to write further novels in the series [...] Waterstone’s is hoping to gather a million signatures for its Save Harry campaign to change the author’s mind [...] Mr Winstone, the chain’s head of children’s books, said: “Harry Potter is a fictional character and therefore can’t ever really be killed. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously killed off Sherlock Holmes, yet brought him back after years of demand from his fans and publishers. Couldn’t the same happen for Harry Potter?”

People, there is no point in demanding moremoremore from her. She’s written enough and has called time on the series. Signing a petition ‘begging’ her to keep writing is akin to flogging a dead horse. If she’s fallen out of love with the characters, is completely sick of writing them, wants to move on, or whatever, all this petition will do is make her feel guilty. And if she’s guilted into writing more? Do you really think it’ll be as good as you want it to be? Do you think her heart will be in it?

Of course it’s only natural to want more of something you love, and it’s hard to watch your favourite series – be it book, TV, movie or fanfic – come to a close, but begging or demanding more when someone no longer wants to create what you love is little short of selfish. It’s fannish entitlement at its worst.

She’s had enough. Let her move on.

I’m even struggling to get the words out for this blog post. Ugh. It isn’t just my head that’s aching; it’s my neck and shoulders, too. A real tension job, this one. I must have been sleeping with my shoulders up around my ears last night.
ETA: I did better than 2000. Managed 3248 in the end. Not bad going