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By kilax, July 9, 2013 4:08 pm

When you are looking at a new-to-you blog, what are the first things you check for to see if you want to continue reading it? What are the things that turn you off?*

I noticed that my 100 Things About Me page gets quite a bit of daily traffic, and thought, “Gosh, maybe I should review that page** and make sure it is accurate… as I wrote it in 2005!” Geesh! That was a looooong time ago!

One of the first things I look at when I read a new blogger is their “about me” info and their location. Location is a big deal for me. If they live close to me, or in an area I am interested in, chances are I am going to continue reading their blog (and by that, I mean add it to my rss feed, and hopefully remember why I subscribed to it). Edited to add – this does not mean I don’t read blogs written by people who don’t live near me. I’m just more likely to start reading a blog because of proximity. 

I like it when I am on a new-to-me blog and I can find this info right away – I have very limited amounts of time to waste on the internet, and must do it efficiently… riiiiiiiiiiight.

But I do think about that in relationship to my blog, so I keep a little introduction widget in my sidebar, to make that information quick to find.

I also think about not leaving whiny posts at the top of my page for two long. Because, yeah. I don’t want that to be the first post someone reads. That is another good question  – when you are looking at new-to-you blogs, how far back in posts do you read, to see if you want to “follow” the blog?

This all implies I am looking for new reads. Of course not! You guys know I am spending ALL of my free time studying. All of it!!!

Um…

*Yeah. Not posting THAT list here.
**Added to list of things to do after July 25th exam.

Comments (47)

By kilax, July 3, 2013 5:40 am

Guys, I have been meaning to ask you an important question – if two bloggers meet for lunch and don’t take a photo and blog about it, did it really happen?!?!*

Ha ha ha.

I’m teasing myself here – I usually meet a blogger once a week for lunch but haven’t been taking photos of these lunch dates, and it feels weird. But I tend to get a bit fixated on documenting memories. I’ve been continuing my beginning of the month digital photo frame exercise, and I probably look forward to it a bit more than I should. So I think restraining from taking photos of everything (especially selfies?) is probably good for me.

Meghan recently recapped her weekend and said about her Saturday, “It was one of those days that the conversation just flowed and we were chatting and having such a great time that the camera or phone didn’t make it out of my bag once to take a picture.”

I read that and thought, I need more days like that! I need to quit thinking so much about taking photos! And just live! Every interaction does NOT need to be documented**.

Are you more likely to take too many photos or too few?

It’s nice that Steven has the fancy schmany camera now – I barely thought about taking photos when we were in Iowa over the weekend – Steven took care of it!

*Or should the question be, if two bloggers meet for lunch, take a photo and DON’T share it on social media, did it really happen? Ha ha.
**You’re still stuck with my training recap pics though!

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By kilax, June 26, 2013 8:37 pm

When the FTC first issued their guidelines on blogger endorsements (i.e. “free stuff”) in 2009, saying “bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service” I was all… “huh?”

I don’t know if I was super naive at the time, or if the FTC was way ahead of the times, but I didn’t understand the need for disclosures. Blogger reviews and promotions were not as big of thing back then (or where they?!). I barely saw it. I surely wasn’t getting offers (certainly not like I do now).

My. How times have changed.

It makes me sad that anytime I read a review now, I automatically assume the blogger is getting reimbursed in some way (paid or free products).

And it makes me even more sad that if I want to write a casual review of something that I like, and bought on my own, I have to say it.

I tried Clif Shot Gels for the first time at the race on Sunday and liked them so much I ordered (READ: PAID FOR MYSELF) a box to use. I was going to mention it tomorrow with a casual, “what have blogger reviews come to these days?” but I thought it deserved a whole post.

Seriously. I feel like I can’t trust most reviews I read from bloggers, since they are mostly sponsored. Yes, even when people point out the not so great stuff. It just doesn’t seem genuine anymore, when people are reviewing stuff all. the. time.

And the worst is when you start to read something and the blogger reveals at the very end that it was sponsored – like they were trying to trick you. I mean, you can usually tell, but come on.

Am I just a fuddy duddy lost in some early 2000s blogging era? Maybe.

But companies – this advertising doesn’t work on me. I just see it and assume bloggers wanted the free stuff. And kind of skim over it.

What does work – my friends and I discussing products in person, or, yes, organically on our blogs.

And yes, I am a hypocrite – I have another type of gel I still need to review!

Do you take blogger reviews very seriously? Do you notice if they paid for it themselves or got it for free?

Comments (71)

By kilax, June 18, 2013 11:27 am

Uh, the answer is most likely no. Unless I know you. Or maybe if you are a celebrity. Ha!

Oddly, I have been getting a lot of email requests for guest posting here. From people I don’t know. Sometimes offering to write about any topic I’d like*. 

Guys, I don’t get it. 

This blog is my voice. My opinions. My life. I may sometimes ask a friend to share their experience or opinion on something, because I think you’d all like to read it… but it’s usually all me. It’s a personal blog. And I suspect you come here because you (usually) want to read posts by me**, not by someone else, right?

Which is not to say I have not written guests posts for other blogs, or had guest posts here. I have done both. But they were for friends or by friends. 

What would be the benefit to me or my readers to have a random guest post (from someone I don’t know)? And would it even benefit the guest poster that much? Who clicks through to read guests posts? I sometimes do, but not that often. 

This all sounds really b*tchy, but I’m not meaning for it to be. It’s just that I don’t do the whole blogger networking/promoting my “brand” sort of thing… so I don’t “get” this.*** So. If you are able to explain the benefits of this to me, please go ahead! 

Or let me know if you get these requests**** too and think, “what the huh?”

*And you know me. I brainstormed some really inappropriate topic requests. I usually email the person back and try to politely say “no thanks.”
**Thank you!!!
***I am especially unfamiliar with freelance writing. 
****From people you don’t know. I understand asking people you do know!

Comments (35)

By kilax, June 6, 2013 6:26 am

• As much as I love to smack talk Facebook and take breaks from it, gosh darnit, it’s pretty cool sometimes. New Neighborhood Runner Friend (NNRF?, eh, let’s just call her Jen) pointed out that we have two Facebook friends in common, and set up a dinner date for us with those two friends and another NNRF (also named Jen, ha ha ha). We went out for dinner on Tuesday night and stayed until the restaurant closed. You can probably guess that we were having a great time. I can’t wait to meet with those gals again and to see who else they introduce me to. It’s so fun to meet people in my neighborhood! It’s great to have friends so close by… and let’s be real – it makes me feel sane to know other people have the same neighborhood complaints as me (like… I should not have to wear these (below) to sleep through the night). Heh. 

• Do you think you would be up to going out to dinner with people you don’t know very well or have never met? How about joining a running relay team with people you have never met? Erin was telling me how one of their Ragnar team members was picked up off the Ragnar Facebook page, and I found that really interesting, as I assume not many people would want to do a relay with a group of strangers (which is kind of how I did it, as I joined Erin’s work running club’s team in 2011).
• For someone who loves stability, I am unexplained annoyed by behavioral predictability… for certain traits, anyway. Yeah. This bullet is not meant to make sense. 
• A few times people have asked me what my “secret” is to not getting injured from running. Which is funny, because I had stress fractures in summer of 2009 and 2010. But! I was thinking about this last night when I drove home from my strength training class, and I was thinking about how beneficial regular strength training is. I think that, paired with the right shoes (and mileage on them) and not falling trap too running too much / too soon / too intense has kept me healthy. Oh. And rest days. What keeps you injury free?

• The new Sierra Trail Mix Clif Bar is awesome-o. Has anyone else tried it?

• I have started buying popcorn for Data. I am sure the vet would approve. 

• It makes me sad how I let technology piss me off. I couldn’t watch a short video on my phone on my train ride home yesterday, or load much of anything else… and it made me irrationally upset. Even though I know there are huge pockets on the train ride home that have very low signal. And today… trying to get these pictures in to this post. Ugh. Problems with my host and some MySQL blah blah blah. Just WORK, technology. I don’t want to figure you out. 
• I realized last week that I use the number sign in my Friday Question posts… but not in Random Thoughts Thursday or in my weekly training posts. Ahh! I hate inconsistency!

Other Random Thoughts Thursday Posts: 41, 40, 39, 38, XXXVII, XXXVI, XXXV, XXXIV, XXXIII, XXXII, XXXI, XXX, XXIX, XVIII, XXVII, XXVI, XXV, XXIV, XXIII, XXII, XXI, XX, XIX, XVIII, XVII, XVI, XV, XIV, XIII, XII, XI, X, IX, VIII, VII, VI, V, IV, III, II, I.

Comments (41)

By kilax, May 6, 2013 6:19 am

I’ve had such busy weekends lately* that I have been purposefully avoiding spending a ton of time online** (Facebook, email, blog reading).

It’s been so refreshing.

But I feel sorta guilty. Just sorta.

Sorta guilty that I am not keeping up with people*** as well as I should.

Sorta guilty that I am shutting down and keeping to myself.

But it’s so nice to just enjoy my time and not constantly check in to social media platforms. And it’s so nice to not feel like I always**** have to rush to share something I just did, or am doing. Honestly, it all gets so overwhelming for me! I feel like I can’t keep up and that turns something that is supposed to be fun in to something stressful.

A ton of people I know ran a half marathon on Saturday and I didn’t look at Facebook until after midnight… so really, the next day. It took me about 30 minutes to scroll through all the posts about the race – there were just so many. I really enjoyed looking at it all, and did feel somewhat bad that I was commenting and “liking” so late, but honestly, I know it’s better for me if I just log in and look at everything once, than try to constantly check in on social media stuff on my phone.

And that is a huge part of the stress. I feel like I am always connected, through my phone, and like I should be checking in on things all the time. Nope. Don’t need to!

Anyways. I am not complaining. I think social media is a lot of fun. I am just recognizing  that I do need to disconnect from time to time. And that I probably don’t need to feel guilty about it.

Has anyone else felt guilty (or sorta guilty) for not being online much?

And since no post is complete with out a picture, please tell me you “get” my shirt for the MAY FOURTH race I did?!

*There is also a lot of this going on.
**On the weekends.
***I actually correspond a lot with my close friends throughout the week. So this is more about keeping up with the people that I don’t email back and forth with, text with daily, etc.
****Not never, because I am still sharing things.

Comments (34)

By kilax, May 1, 2013 6:23 am

What is your oldest online relationship?

That sounds kind of creepy, doesn’t it?!

This weekend, I finally got to meet Courtney. The triad is now officially complete! Hee hee hee.

Gina, Courtney and I have been communicating with each other since winter of 2006! I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but here we go again. I started my blog just before then to keep in touch with people when I lived in Rome. One of my classmates in Rome had an msn blog, found Gina, and recommended her blog to me because it was about her cat. And derp. I like cats. So I started talking to Gina, and Courtney had an msn blog too (and also had cats), and boom, there you go. United! By cats!

And was so nice to finally meet Courtney! I mean, we have done google hangouts before, but that is not quite the same. Courtney has such a sarcastic sense of humor but lays it out so sneaky and sweet. Muah ha ha ha. I loves* it. I mean, she is sweet too, but I can appreciate some sarcasm.

Back to my original question. I was thinking that might be my longest online relationship, but I wonder if I have been talking to kapgar since fall of 2005. My old hand-coded blog lost all of it comments when the comment app I was using discontinued, so we will have to rely on memory.

And as I mentioned before, I also got to meet a long-time blogging friend when I was in Salt Lake City (SLC) – Marty! Again, not sure on the exact length of our online relationship, but I found him through bloggers I found right away when I started blogging in summer of 2005, so it must be another long one.

Marty’s so easy to talk to! I really enjoyed all of the times I got to see him in SLC – for a run that Thursday, vegan cafe for lunch on Friday, at the race and brunch on Saturday. We had some really good conversations, and I hope I see him again so we get to continue them. He is teasing me about training for the SLC Half Marathon in 2014. I would totally do that race again! I loved running it solo and imagine and would be even more fun with a friend!

And I just have to mention this because it is so bizarro. My mom’s flight to SLC was über delayed. Like, so much that she got there a day late (Thursday instead of Wednesday , and a few minutes after me. And that was after connecting through a completely different airport (due to a snowstorm in the one she was originally supposed to connect in). Blah! Too many details!

Anyways… my mom’s connecting flight ended up being in Dallas. I was connecting in Dallas. Gina was in the Dallas airport with her family for a flight to NYC. My mom’s flight continued to be delayed, so! She finally got to meet Gina and Steve and Luca!!! That is a fun way to spend time in the airport!

My mom is so cute. I talk so much about Gina and her family that my mom thought they had already met before. Muah ha ha. Nope.

So I was thinking of titling this post “Not everyone online is a creep!” but thought that might get me some strange search results. But isn’t it funny how you can make such close relationships with people just through online communication? Even before Skype was popular? Just relying on the written word? That’s pretty neat!

Pssst, I am so slammed right now that you might not see me much online for awhile… but I am trying and will catch up! That’ll be me, commenting on posts that are over a week old…

*Purposeful typo.

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By kilax, April 10, 2013 12:19 pm

Last week, I was contacted about being an ambassador for the Venus de Miles bike ride on July 28. Exciting!!!

Venus de Miles is a 25 or 61 mile supported, non-competitive, all women’s road ride in Lake County, Illinois (where I live!). Each entrant pays to participate as well as fundraises $75 to support Greenhouse Scholars, which provides scholarships to “high-performing, under-resourced college students.”

But I was kind of waffling. 

I am so damn busy. 

I have something going on every weekend until mid July. The idea of putting one more thing on my calendar freaks me out.

And then there is the other issue.

Sigh. 

I recently wrote my “On Sponsored Giveaways” post and have just been thinking a lot about what I promote on here. I am still getting weird offers for things. And requests from people for me to randomly blog about stuff that, well, I just don’t want to blog about. Why would I promote something I don’t use or an event that I have never heard about?

So. I had to think about whether or not Venus de Miles was something I wanted to blog about. As an ambassasdor, I get a free ride, one to raffle off, some gear, my photo on their site, etc. And I just have to write for them (and do the ride, obviously). 

Why was I so torn on this?! It was really bothering me that I couldn’t make up my mind. Here I was, given an opportuntity to do something I already wanted to do, and for free! Who wouldn’t immediately say yes?! Why was I overthinking it?

I guess my online integrity has become really important to me, lately, for some reason. 

So, what did I decide? To do it. I already wanted to. I know I will have fun – even if I am out there on my mountain bike. 

I just wanted to be honest with you guys, and share my decision making process. 

Anyone else over thinking their blog lately?

Comments (46)

By kilax, April 2, 2013 6:28 am

Nothing specific inspired me to write about this. It’s just something I think about often as a blogger, and as someone who reads blogs/visit social media sites. The topic is… validation.

There are two situations which seem to bring me back to thinking about validation.

Situation #1 is an argument I have in my head a lot (and sometimes with friends). I’ll notice a not-so-nice comment on a blog or Facebook, and think “Why bother commenting if you have nothing nice to say/useful to add/etc.?” “Why are people such trolls, blah blah blah?”

But then I start to argue with myself – if we only receive positive confirmation on our blogs (and other social media) that… is not a realistic representation of life. And truthfully, social media never will be! But! Is it healthy to let constant positive conformation validate our actions?

Here’s an example – I wrote in my training post this week that I did a double (including speedwork) the day before a long run over 20 miles… and had heart issues on that long run. GUYS! THAT WAS (somewhat) STUPID OF ME TO DO! I need you to call me out on my sh*t! No one did! (Granted, that post was long and boring…) But didn’t you think that was somewhat stupid?! Why didn’t you say something?! I can take it!

Heh heh heh. It’s hard to know how to comment on people’s blogs when you don’t know them well, especially when it’s so dang difficult to display tone online. But I feel sometimes it’s important to leave that comment that doesn’t validate what the person is saying, but asks them to think about it some more. And I’d like to think you can do that in a non troll-like manner. Maybe? Feel free to practice it here, if you’d like. 

Situation #2 is more straight forward. Do you ever find yourself more excited about blogging about doing something than actually doing it? Gosh, I hope not. But I sometimes get the impression that people do feel like they have to do certain things so they can blog about them. Please! Do what you want! Blog about what you want! Don’t blog about what you don’t want! But never feel like you have to do things, then blog about them, for your life to be validated. You are alive. Your lifestyle choices are validated… uh, as long as they are mostly legal. Heh. 

Reading this, it seems like the two situations somewhat contradict one another – we shouldn’t expect everything we do and say to be validated online, but then… we should do what we want because we don’t need online validation? Huh? Here we go – we don’t need it, so don’t always expect to get it. 

What do you think?! 

Comments (64)

By kilax, March 19, 2013 6:12 am

I wouldn’t call myself a savvy blogger. I don’t pay attention to blogging trends. I’m not on Bloglovin’. Or Twitter. I don’t know what my page views are. I don’t have any ads on here. I rate my blog’s success on how it makes me feel – if I enjoy writing it – it’s successful. If I am enjoying it and getting comments about it? Well, that’s über successful! When I am stressed about it, something’s wrong.

Anyway. Despite not being so savvy, I still receive emails with offers to review or give away things* (or the “please share this link!” email from random companies). I feel very uncomfortable promoting someone else’s product for them, unless it’s 100% something I believe in. I’m a very “live and let live” type of person – I don’t try to push other people to do things they don’t want to do. Especially if it’s not something I particularly like, myself.

So I turn down a lot of (but not all) requests to write about these products. Which is what made me think to write this, today. I received a nice request to give away a gift card to an online clothing store, but it just wasn’t something I could see myself using, or, wanting to write about. Because despite how mediocre my writing is, writing does take time. So when someone sends me an offer to review something, but then sends me a page of details for how** I have to do it, well… that turns me off.

Anyway. This is just on my mind today. I guess I just don’t like being told what to write about or promoting other people’s stuff unless, like I said, I am 100% behind it. Which is why I sponsor most of my own giveaways!

What are your self-imposed “rules” for doing sponsored giveaways?

How do you perceive bloggers who do sponsored giveaways?

I think if I were to get in to this more, I would talk about how uncomfortable I am with accepting things just because they are “free,” and how much the accumulation of junk sets me off… but let’s leave that topic for another day! 

*Maybe not so much after writing this post.
**The clothing store did not do that, I am referring to a different product.