Blog etiquette

Know the worst thing about blogging?

The finality. I know they're built with comments and unlimited editing functions, but once it's out there, it's out there. You kind of feel like a fraud if you are ripping and re-writing whole sections from posts.

I feel that once it's out there, you should leave it for better or worse. That was one of the best things about newspaper work (and one of the worst) - in the land of TV and radio, there's very little the average viewer or listener can do to document the words zipping by them at any moment.

People have what the think they hear (a phenomenon cited by two Chicago sports radio guys as listening to the imaginary radio) or think they saw on the news, but it's hard to capture that and nearly impossible to transport it. Put it this way - I got used to people clipping my stories to bring them to community meetings and city council hearings, but I never saw anyone wheel in a TV cart with a tape cued up to WGN's morning show.

Same rules here - sure, I'll clean up spelling, axe deadweight when I read through a post later in the day or add punchlines I was too distracted to include, but for the most part, what is posted is what you'll see next week as well.

This presents a problem, as it lends an air of finality to the posts. Sure, I can preface them with 'first of many...' statements or pre-season capsules like what's going on at the Siberian Baseball site, but barring that, it's hard to pick up a topic and go back at it. For instance I've noticed that
nearly everyone (myself included) starts a new blog with a posting of why they never wanted a blog and how a friend made one, so they did, too - or- they had to do one for a work or school project. Sometimes they had to do one at the urging of their parole officer.

I'd like to add more of these, but what's the best way to leave that open-ended without tripping all over myself to leave that open-ended. If it's this hard to leave the story open for a sequel, maybe Sly Stallone is a lot brighter than anyone gives him credit for.

Still haven't figured out how to tackle that yet, but guess that's why the blogging genre is still a work in progress.