The growing pains of Bakersfield blogging - By N.L. Belardes

I just left a portion of this post on my new N.L. Belardes profile blog page on bakersfield.com. What do you think?


The growing pains of Bakersfield blogging - By N.L. Belardes


I had an interesting comment through Bakersfield.com’s profile services, part of which read:

“…Looking forward to seeing how prolific you'll be here at Bakersfield.com"

Recently I was at a local music show. I ran into a guy and mentioned the new profiles, blogging, and audio aspects of Bakersfield.com. He said, “I don’t see the Californian blogs going anywhere. It’s just going to be incestuous,” meaning that perhaps Californian’s blogs might fall within an inclusive group of staff and friends.

Already I have seen people who have criticized the Californian, myself included, use the new profile system for self-promotional and other promotional aims. So I would have to disagree with the incestuous comment.

Dan Pacheco of Bakersfield.com once indicated during a music night at Fishlips in downtown Bakersfield that the Internet is a huge love fest… and such cyber love is give and take. It takes a lot of sharing links to truly help each other’s sites to rise in the realm of Internet rankings.

We’ll see if I use the blogs very much. I look at it this way. I already have a blog engine that works really well. But yes, I am all for helping build an online community. And that means interacting even deeper within the recently termed “Bakosphere” (I already interact within bakotopia.com and MAS).

The Californian staff however is welcome to leave public comments on my Paperback Writer blog. But will they on my turf?

A few have. Some I have battled with, some I haven’t. That’s natural. We can’t always agree with each other.

Although Howard Owens is gone, I didn’t dislike him and we had a few online battles. I figured why not express my opinion and be direct with him at that about my opinions of the dangers of conversation journalism. After all, Howard did try to start a blogger war between me and that dastardly Black Dog.

He deserved my blunt honesty in return for his humorous attempt at blog battles.

The Californian views me in a peculiar light. I’m not always sure how that light shines, but doubt if it is often rosy. Yet, I feel the light on me, watching how I will interact. Sometimes I laugh and wonder if there are Post-Its all over the desks at the Californian, reading, “Stay off nlbelardes.com!”

All I can suggest is that growth begats growing pains. There’s a human element in the unseen faces behind many Bakersfield blogs. There are the unseen faces of the bloggers, those that control some of the blog communities, and those who plan them out, build, and maintain them. People’s feelings get hurt. And that leads to distrust. But when the dust settles, the Californian and myself are both trying to grasp a quickly growing and constantly transforming technology.

Share the blogs, share the comments, and don’t let others think that Bakersfield.com blogs are just an incestuous community, but one of sharing, growing, and building a respectable and diverse online presence within a global community.

The readers of this blog are there.

But will the comments be?

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Tuesday, June 13, 2006. You can leave your response.