BABY BOOMER IN THE BLOGOSPHERE
I promised to say something about this new-to-me experience of blogging. Well, as someone who is a card-carrying female Canadian baby boomer, I can tell you: the blogosphere is not my world. In fact, according to Technorati’s 2009 report “State of the Blogosphere,” most bloggers are between the ages of 18-44, American, and male.
I do have a website – who doesn’t these days? – but I certainly don’t Twitter, although my blogger friends tell me I might consider doing that, since that’s one way for people to find my blog.
I do have a Facebook account, but I hardly ever use it. I set it up years ago when my kids were in their early teens so I could stealth them. They of course forgot they had made me their “friend” because I never posted anything on their walls; I snooped silently on their postings and when concerned, had to be very creative about how I approached them with what I’d learned on FB.
I am, after all, a member of the generation that started all this technology stuff. So it wasn’t a huge stretch to come up with the idea of writing this blog. I was chatting with my son, “Corporate Guy” (a recent Business Marketing grad) about how businesses have really started to expand into social networking. A website is no longer sufficient – businesses worldwide are now using all manner of blogs, tweets and walls to reach their increasingly Internet-dependent customers. Those “Generation Ys” are now getting jobs and buying stuff! And so I thought, hey, I could write a blog about writing my book!
Are Gen Y’s interested in blogs about historical adventure books? Would they at least tell their Boomer parents about the blog so they can subscribe? I guess we’ll find out!
Muskoka Books and I plan to link the blog to several Muskoka area and history-based sites, helping it to do what it needs to do. Which is: bring people to the site so they can watch a writer in the act of getting from idea to published book.
Yikes. Sounds suspiciously like the stealthing I used to do on Facebook.