Thing 12

The articles about blogging were enlightening.  I'm not proficient with blogging at all, but I do find it interesting.  From the article How to comment like a king (or queen), one thing that caught my eye was the fact that this blogger takes the time to read the blogs of the people that comment on his blog.  I'm not sure why, but that sort of surprised me. It makes perfect sense; we do something similar when we post comments to discussion questions for our classes to see if anyone has added more.  In some cases it may take up the better part of the day to check and recheck blog postings!

In the article 10 techniques to get more comments on your blog (of which I noticed that he had 724 comments - not bad), he stated that in order to attract comments you should keep posts open-ended and not sound like an expert on everything, but allow others to feel that they can contribute to your posts by adding to them.  I can see where this would take some practice, to try to find that fine line between being too broad with your comments and sounding like a know-it-all who doesn't need any more information on the subject.  I also realized that I have a title -- I'm one of the 90% lurkers out there (people who read blogs but don't leave comments)!

This past summer I had quite a bit of time on my hands, and I used part of that time exploring on the Internet. I found a few blogs that I really enjoyed reading and keeping up with.  Both of these were found accidentally while I was trying to get new recipe ideas to try.  Apparently they are both popular in the blogging world too.

Iowa Girl Eats, http://iowagirleats.com/ , is about a young married woman who really enjoys her food!  She writes a daily post of what she's had for breakfast, lunch, (often) snack, and dinner, and includes recipes to go along with most of the postings.  I made several of her recipes, including Italian Wedding Soup that was way better than the recipe I already had.  This summer she posted about a visit she had to Iowa's popular ice cream factory - she was one of 6 Iowas-based bloggers who were invited.  She also once posted about a box of free samples of a snack bar she likes.  She has gotten someone's attention!

The other, The Pioneer Woman, http://thepioneerwoman.com/ , is the writings of a married mother of four who lives on a cattle ranch.  She must also be a wonderful cook, as she has a cookbook out and was on a Food Network cooking segment with one of their stars. She often gives away free cookware; in fact, the last one attracted over 37,000 people.