I was reading a couple of posts written by some new bloggers yesterday. There are a lot of self-discovery entries about feeling true to oneself - an "epiphany", for want of a better word. Are new bloggers trying to please their audience rather than writing within their comfort zone and letting the audience find them?
Blogging is becoming much more of a social concept. I wrote an article for a magazine aimed at new Parent Bloggers, although the advice is the same for everyone. One observation I made was that blogs used to sit in their little corner of the internet, waiting to be discovered or they were read when you happened to mention to a friend that you wrote a blog. Very often, personal blogs were considered a dirty little secret.
Now that more people are using the internet to socialise, blogging has become more acceptable as a way to communicate with the world. New blogs are never going to have the same status as some of the more established blogs out there, but they are creating her own merry band of followers, all of whom are already looking forward to new entries (including me). Some of those readers will have stumbled across the blog though searches on Google, some will have seen self-promotional Tweets and some will be following a brand new "fan" page on Facebook. We may have some mutual readers but our online communities are different.
In the same respect, my crossover is completely different to yours too. I have created a wonderful community for networking and support, but there are other blogs out there too. To have the same people reading the same blogs becomes incredibly insular, doesn't it?