Of the many useful blog posts, one a few days ago entitled five reasons why freelancers should blog was the tipping point for me in deciding whether to start my own. This article also explains why WordPress is a good blogging platform for making your posts visible on search engines (nice little plug there).

Scott Rosenburg of wordyard.com writes in The Guardian today (29/08/07) that blogging is now in its second decade. The first blogger was apparently Jorn Barger, who began his ‘Robot Wisdom’ blog in 1997. This of course comes as some surprise to me, as someone who has arrived at the phenomenon relatively late, but I found myself convinced by Rosenburg’s well-argued criticism of ‘blog haters’.

I have been slow to understanding blogging, and to realize the benefits of writing my own. Even now I am 99% motivated by professional reasons, but it seems to me there is next to no harm in diving into an already overcrowded pool. In fact, apparently the more the better!

It amuses me that I am effectively coming in on the coat-tails of so many long-established bloggers, but in a way that’s kind of the point and the beauty of this whole thing, right? Not many bloggers claim to be professional writers or journalists (myself included), they are simply sharing their experience and opinions over the net, and the effect of this is hugely positive much more often than it is negative.

As Rosenburg argues, “what, exactly are Wolfe and other blogging detesters worried out? We’re not going to run out of web space”, and uses the example of a man in the U.S. named David Miller who blogged about his experience with cancer. Miller must be one of thousands of people blogging about personal battles, but the point is that in our fragmented world it was important to Miller and his loved ones that he was expressing something so personal through this medium, no matter how many others were doing the same.

It seems to me that what is crucial is that you establish from the outset what it is you want to share with other blog readers. Otherwise you risk it being just a bright idea that never really had any point to it, just another blight of a landmark in cyberspace and liable to fall prey to criticism from the likes Tom Wolfe (of Wall Street Journal) as containing “narcissistic shrieks and baseless ‘information’”. With this in mind, and self-consciously trying to avoid being guilty of any ‘narcissistic shrieks’, I hope to be able to use for the following purposes:

a) express and invite opinion about developments in translation and linguistics
b) recommend authoritative links on other translation bloggers‘ sites, particularly with translation students in mind.
c) learn from others’ blogs
d) raise of the profile of translating and interpreting as a career
e) most importantly: publicize my profile as a freelance translator and seek opportunities