Sean Bonner – Blogger Week
This is it! Blogger week’s been fun, and last but definitely not least, Sociosophy reviews:
Sean Bonner – http://seanbonner.com
Sociosophy: What was the reason you started to blog?
Sean Bonner: It’s something I’ve always done, some kind of weird need to spill my guts to strangers or something. When I was in college I used to write these one page fanzine things – I’d just type until I filled up a page and then that would be the end. I’d photocopy them and leave them around in record stores and stuff. Later on when people started getting online it only made sense to do something similar there. At first I was handcoding pages and FTPing them up so it wasn’t quite so fluid, and it turns out other people were doing it to which lead to software to make it easier and eventually people started calling it blogging.
Sociosophy: What keeps you going?
Sean Bonner: I really don’t know what keeps me going, I’ve thought about quitting before but I keep going back and kind of can’t resist. It’s a weird kind of therapy in many ways, plus I’m delusional and think it might lead to something better someday.
If there was ever an award to be given out for “Most Down to Earth Blogger”, it’d probably go to Sean Bonner. The guy’s got talent, is part of one of the largest blogging networks in the world, MetBlogs, and still manages to be completely human about the whole blogging thing. Like the other bloggers included in Blogger Week, he writes about what interests him, and it just happens to be things that interest a lot of others, there’s no motive to turn blogging in to gold, it’s genuine, and it’s real.
Here’s a snippet from his “About” page that sums up where his efforts started and where it went:
Sean Bonner has been putting things on the internet since 1994. As the creator of several widespread memes he has been featured in Wired, Wired News, The Register, The Industry Standard, CNN, Playboy, Salon, Forbes, ZDNet, CBS News, The New York Post, USA today, The Chicago Sun Times, The Silicon Alley Reporter, Yahoo! Magazine (Best of the Web) among others and has spoken on panels across the US about online communities and grassroots local journalism.
As I wrap this whole thing up, I realize that I’ve learned a lot about the bloggers I read about, and one thing’s for certain, they all share a common enjoyment for what they do, and do it because it’s right for them, and feels great doing it. I can definitely relate – and Sean nailed it in our virtual interview with his realistic and straight forward outlook on the whole experience.
Sociosophy, “How many hours a week do you spend thinking about blog posts and writing?”
Sean, “Thinking? Nonstop. Honestly, there are few activities where blogging isn’t in my head somehow. How much that translates into actual blog posts depends much more on how much listening to or ignoring that little voice in my head that tells me no one gives a crap or I’d just be boring people if I wrote about that. You can see it in my blog, I go through major runs of posting long entries very frequently and then other times where it will go days with barely a links post. Traveling and friends around effects it as well, but not always negatively. I find that I write a lot late at night when I can’t sleep, so if I’m sleeping well then my writing slows down. You’d think with all the coffee I drink I’d have pretty well forced insomnia but turns out I’ve built up one hell of a resistance to it.”
Sociosophy, “If you could change one thing about your blog, what would it be?”
Sean, “I’d make it not suck.”
Sociosophy, “What’s your favorite Social Media outlet other than your blog?”
Sean, ‘Twitter for sure. It’s the thing I interact with the most and I’ve seen the most drastic change in how I interact with people overall. I think years from now we’ll look back it as really revolutionary.”
Sociosophy, “Do you think Twitter and FriendFeed contribute or take away from your blogging?”
Sean, “Well I don’t use FriendFeed so that doesn’t take away from anything, and I don’t know that twitter does either rather it’s kind of an extension of it. I talk about things on twitter that I probably wouldn’t go through the effort to write blog posts about. At the same time spending a few hours talking to people via twitter is certainly time that, if twitter didn’t exist I might be using for blogging. But honestly the interesting thing is interacting with people and putting stuff out there that hopefully someone finds interesting so what medium that happens to manifest itself in isn’t that important. Blog posts, tweets, moblog pics on flickr – it’s all a piece of something larger.”
Read Sean Bonner at http://blog.seanbonner.com/ and check out his Twitter @seanbonner.
[photo by Joi Ito]
