sun, stars and you?

The last few days I have had be zipping around in France and publishing even a short blog entry has been a minor challenge. I usually blog from a mac and all of the drag and droppy things make everything very quick. Using my Thinkpad means a lot more button pushing and general futzing.

But one of the interesting things during my trip was running into a good friend from Ireland who is also a blogger. We've known each other for quite a few years "in real life" and over a few glasses of drink in a noisy bar, we caught up on what each other had been doing and recounted each others' twists and turns providing advice and good counsel along the way.

And amongst it, for a while, we flipped to chatting about our respective blogs. My 'twinkly eyed' friend is something of a political blogger and describes some situations affecting the Republic of Ireland World in an attention grabbing and deliberately controversial style. Part of the challenge with the political blogs is getting the audience and I suppose just as importantly getting a debate running. We've all seen the newspaper blogs such as Grauniad or Torygraph with their extensive comment chains on the items posted.

So I described a few of the techniques the politico blogs use to increase traffic (linkfests, trackbacks etc.) and some of the pieces of technology used to track who is looking at what. I even said I'd put it into an email at some point, so I'd better do that as well. The strange thing is, I don't think either my friend or I have really chatted 'in real life' about the technology of blogging to anyone else.

We both agreed that we'd started out almost whimsically and probably both taken about a day and a half to get our initial blogs working properly (with mastheads, links etc). After that, we interact with the blogosphere but seldom run into other bloggers (okay, Facebook is slightly different - and we know some F&F (family and friends) who read our blogs), but overall there really is a separate 'world' with which we interact.

In both cases we'd also selected a non personal image for our blog presence too - for differing reasons - and this operates in a different space to our other more visible internet presences.

So, I'm wondering about the experiences of others who started out and whether they know a lot of their audience directly, or whether it really is a separate world?