Blogging: Like a 'soap bubble'

This week's news that AOL will buy The Huffington Post, the wildly successful website that's become synonymous with liberal political commentary, gives me a chance to look backward and forward.

Right after Christmas, as I was scouring the near-empty book shelves of our downtown Borders store before it closed, I stumbled upon a deeply discounted copy of "The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging."

Oy. If only I'd known about it two years earlier! It was published in December 2008, three months before I began my blog. And now that I read it after nearly two years of blogging myself, I see that much of the content would have been useful. What's comforting, though, is that I'm familiar with virtually all the vocabulary and the main concepts behind a blog, as well as many of the best practices.

What I could have used starting now -- and still need even now -- is more discipline at writing short. That's going to become increasingly important as I develop a voice for blogging at work.

Perhaps the most memorable anecdotal piece of advice in the book comes from Huff Post blogger Nora Ephron, who once worked in daily journalism but has since moved on to writing books, screenplays and magazine articles. She says that when she first started blogging, she thought it was "like other short things, like essays for instance, which are polished and have a kind of history as to form and length."

"But then I saw," she writes.

"Blogs were different from whatever had gone before. They weren't meant to be polished, like essays. They were informal, they were temporal. The comments they engendered...were a conversation, and one of the reasons for blogging was to start the conversation and to create the community that comes together briefly to talk about things they might not be talking about if you hadn't written your blog.


"The short lifespan wasn't a detriment, it was the point: A blog was a soap bubble, meant to last just a moment or two. The medium is the message: The medium was high-speed and the message appeared quickly and vanished just as quickly. The odds on a blog being relevant or even comprehensible days later were remote; just as well that it lasted only a moment.


"And a blog didn't have to end, as essays do. It simply had to stop."

I knew that, of course, both in my head and in my bones. But the soap bubble metaphor is something that, for better or worse, brilliantly captures the essence of a blog. I now carry that image in my head.

Photography by Iman Sadeghi