Moderated by Jimmy Greenfield of Chicago Now, a Tribune-owned network of local bloggers, this panel featured four bloggers who spoke offline about the best ways to write, edit, and publish online. Kelly Ryan O’Brien of fashion blog Idols and Egos, Nikki Knepper of parenting blog Moms Who Drink and Swear, Julie DiCaro of sports blog A League of Her Own, and Andrew Huff of arts and culture blog Gapers Block all have one thing in common: they recall that the creation of their blogs was purely accidental. But more specifically, their blogs were created out of the necessity to address an issue that needed its own web address.
Huff said that he got the idea for Gaper’s Block, which now includes eight section editors and countless contributors, while writing a monthly newsletter to family and friends and realizing that there would inevitably always be stories he couldn’t squeeze into just one newsletter. DiCaro, on the other hand, realized she needed her own blog when she and her friends started getting flack for dominating the comments section of more traditional sports websites. Twitter led her to other women who were writing about sports; over 90 women have contributed to the blog since its founding in 2007.
DiCaro’s advice on styling a distinctive voice in your blog? Offer different kinds of content and coverage than that of the major online news outlets like ESPN, for example, when writing about sports. Otherwise, why would your audience choose your blog over ESPN if you’re covering sports exactly the same way? DiCaro’s other piece of advice for starting a blog: “Grow about five new layers of skin, particularly if you’re a woman and you’re blogging about sports.” If you can’t deal with it, she warned, then you should probably just be writing in your diary.
Nikki Knepper agreed that airing her opinions online occasionally went hand-in-hand with receiving nasty feedback and disturbing emails. But for Knepper, whose blog is published by Chicago Now, the perks of blogging outweigh the negatives. The staunchly anti-profit blogger likes to use her social media presence to promote other mom bloggers and charities in her community, rather than selling ad space on her webpage. “Your blog is jacked up with crap,” Knepper said of other bloggers who use their online presence to turn a profit.
Meanwhile, O’Brien said she didn’t have a problem with using sites like Commission Junction and Linkshare to make a commission from linking to a company or a product that she already liked and intended to blog about anyway.
While some bloggers disagreed about the legalities of hotlinking, (or linking to an image already in use by another website), they all agreed on the importance of building your audience by adding other blogs to your own blogroll and linking to other sites whenever possible. “Links are the currency of the web,” said Huff, while DiCaro echoed similar sentiments: “blogging is a collaboration, not a competition.”
-Jennifer Swann
