Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Reflections on Creating An Enthusiast Blog

I have completed my first project, and have created the beginning of an enthusiast blog. Creating an enthusiast blog was definitely an interesting and enjoyable experience. Coming into this project, I had no experience with blogs at all; reading or writing them, so I was slightly nervous that I was going to struggle in the process of creating my own blog. In the end though, it was a great learning experience that I took alot out of and also truly enjoyed doing.

Before we began crafting our enthusiast blogs, we read the article by Stefenac which served as an introduction to clubhouse/enthusiast blogs and how they work, what they are all about, and the critical components that make up a successful enthusiast blog. In the article Stefenac stated that the true success of an enthusiast blog comes with the passion the writer feels for their particular topic: "They are authored by individuals with an honest love of their topics and who take delight in cultivating both their topic areas and their audiences." The article also included excerpts from a real enthusiast blog written by Mr. Jalopy. This article was extremely helpful in familiarizing me with enthusiast blogs, and it really gave me a good feel for how they work and began to give me ideas for what I wanted to do with my blog. Reading and analyzing Stefenac's article laid the foundation for the process of creating my own enthusiast blog.

The next step was brainstorming a potential topic for my enthusiast blog. I knew that I needed my focus to be something that I felt passionantley about and would be a topic through which I could convey certain aspects of my personality to my audience. My initial five topics I came up with as potential topics did not actually include the topic I settled on. Around the same time as this brainstorming process was going on, I was undergoing my own personal struggle: quitting smoking. Just as it was coming time to settle on a topic for our blogs, I decided that quitting smoking could be the perfect topic for my clubhouse blog. My desire to quit smoking was something I felt passionatley about, and by documenting my struggle I felt I could portray my personality to my audience.

I concluded that quitting smoking would be the focus of my enthusiast blog. Now that I had taken this first major step of picking a topic for my blog, it was time to begin constructing my enthusiast blog.

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