What we learned blogging

Here is a summary of what we learned so far.

The main point: No blogging guidelines quite prepare you for the real experience.

So, in no particular order, here are some individual aspects of note.

1) Sustained blogging requires effort
Everybody can write twenty posts, but putting something out there every day does require a little bit of work. Make some drafts to be prepared for mental dry spells.

2) Reader comments can drive a blogger nuts
But only if you let them. The first comment we received was about the Eurocrats and Novel Foods post. The comment pointed out the placebo effect and gave a helpful link to a description of the placebo effect.

We deleted the comment.

Blatant censorship?

No! We make mistakes, we cannot know everything. But...how can we say this without offending someone....we have an amount of brainpower that many other blogs may not have.
Yet, our intellectual blind spots are many and varied, please point them out to us, and we let your comments live.

In the Eurocrats post, our observation of the properties of Muna tea were waaaay beyond a one time phenomenon and based on stringent methodologies that would put some pharmaceutical studies to shame. That prowess, however, was not the point of the post -- the point was that we are protected from irregularities in a 50 K dollars a year Muna market but that no one gives a s**** in, for example, the Billion Dollar printer ink market.

3) Nudity and religion still work, but digs at "FamousCompanyNameHere" are just as good
No further explanation needed.

 4) Social networks increase our audience
Once we went on Twitter, our audience doubled. Facebook also gave us a boost. We ditched Facebook right away, though.

5) Asynchronous processing is a challenge
If you really understand this numbered list item, I mean the part before "is a challenge", hey, we are glad to have you and hope you won't feel lonely on this blog.
Setting up a daisy chain from your blog through twitterfeed and bit.ly to social networks is easy. Realizing that, if you select, say hourly update, only the last post published in that hour will actually appear on the social site may take some time.

6) It feels good to speak our mind
With the qualifier "if you are in a laid back, safe, G8 (7, or 7.5) or so place". Individual results may vary if you hail from a different location.

7) The world does not revolve around us
Which is a really good thing, because it would be very wobbly and uncomfortable for everybody.

8) As a blogger, we can learn something
It may be as trivial as finally learning that the Dalai Lama is a spiritual leader whereas Tony Lama is a brand of consumer goods. Or as cool as seeing the Lithuanian Olympic Basketball Team in their Grateful Dead tie-dyes.

8) The Simpsons are still funny
And we find it so nice that they had a short "in memory of Huell Howser" in their credits.

As a novice blogger, you may experience a slightly heady, euphoric feeling after your first couple of blogs, and then again after the first one hundred or so page views.

These are completely normal symptoms of blogging or other public activity, and they should subside after a week or two.

If the symptoms persist, discontinue blogging immediately and seek professional assistance.