I admit that Sundays the first section of the Times I pick up is Sunday Styles, because while I write a blog and read blogs I also read newsprint. And the Style section is usually fun, filled with the latest fashions and trends and of course,my absolute favorite, Vows. Who doesn’t want to read the story of how two people find love and each other? Reading the Style section first, makes it easier for me to digest the Business section and the Week in Review.
Today my eyes zeroed in to an article on the front page, Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest. Judging from that headline it didn’t sound very uplifting, but this is the Style section and the sun was shining, so I bravely read on.
There was no mention of the influence a well written, well followed blog can have, nor the success stories of the ones that get a great readership. Not a word about how a blog can help brand you and network you without ever leaving your house. Nor did it mention that it gives everyone an equal opportunity moment to create their own personalized, living, breathing interactive resume.
No, no. This was all about failure. The blogs that don’t succeed, the ones that go abandoned by readers or worse yet by the writer. I imagined this ravaged forest, with patches of green trying to sprout between broken twigs, dead leaves and fallen trees. Those little seedlings looking for fertile soil would represent the 7.4 million blogs they cited that are considered current according to Technorati. If you were contemplating starting to blog, I suggest you do not read this article.
I guess whoever was doing the layout for the page didn’t see the curiosity that I would in placing an invitation to visit one of these forest members just below the article. If like me, you had no idea what The Moment is, it is a daily NY Times Style blog. Yes, according to the article, blogs are falling every day. Still newspapers everywhere keep adding them to their own on line features and promoting them. I’ll let you know if I think its worthy to add to my Google Reader or just let it fall on that forest floor.
Before I flipped forward to Vows, which I knew was a sure bet for a happy story, I jumped across the page. What’s Your Backup Plan? I liked this. I am a big believer in having a Plan B. Between the state of most people’s 401K’s and how much longer we are all living , it is unreasonable to think that one career will do for a lifetime. I think it’s wise to have a Plan B percolating on the back burner.
I am glad the sun was shining, the sky blue and if I listened hard enough an occasional bird chirping amidst the traffic outside my NYC apartment while the author alluded that Plan B’s were mere fantasies, reaching the conclusion that there was a reason many of us choose to live in cubicles.
I’m thinking their writing this Sunday was influenced by all the rain and gloom that descended on New York this past week. I didn’t make it to the Business section or the Week in Review. I’d already read enough doom.
But I don’t sway easily and am happy to report, I am still standing. I am a glass half full girl at the beginning of her entrepreneur days who is passionate about what she is doing, including the care and tending of her blog, (which thanks to the Times, I was inspired to feed today.) Most importantly, as Barry Eisler writes is critical in being an entrepreneur, I am a girl who believes in herself.
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