Each week we invite a different blogger to select their 10 favourite blog posts for our Friday Ten at Ten round-up. We also ask our guest blogger to submit a guest post, and tell us what’s on their mind.
This week our guest is Merry, from over at Patch of Puddles. Want to know the important stuff about Merry? Well, for that you’ll have to mosey on over to her blog. But I can tell you that she only has one toenail (I KNOW! I couldn’t imagine it either…). Want another totally-interesting fact? She’s a proper gen-yoo-wine cockney (love). Uh huh. Now don’t say we don’t know how to winkle a story out of someone.
Anyhoo. Merry’s a bit of an old hand at these interwebs – Patch of Puddles turns NINE this month. Yes, that’s nine YEARS blogging. In that time she’s learned a thing or two – and as she celebrates her Blog Birthday she’s been mulling on this whole blogging malarky…
Merry Writes:
This month my blog turns 9 years old. During that 9 years it has charted the story of home educating my children, the growth of my business, the births of several children and the death of one. I’ve written about everything from days out to depression, tried new crafts, sunk into the oblivion of being overworked and overwhelmed, sent a child to school, knitted, linked to silliness and muttered madly. Recently, with my children reaching an age where they want their life described in less minutiae on the web, it has been more about me and my thoughts and less their life. But whatever else it is, it is a very real account of this family through my eyes. I started it, having been a diarist as a teenager, so I could look back on bringing up my family and being a mother.
The internet was small when I began; PoP was read only by my friends. No one had heard of blogs and the idea was alien. Even owning an internet business, it seemed inconceivable that it would grow as it has and that ‘what’s your blog called?’ would become almost as natural as ‘what’s your mobile number? I used my children’s real names because it barely occurred to me not to. I designed it to please me, not because I wanted it to please gadgets or readers. I used it to connect with people and talk with people (before Twitter… imagine!) and it became my home on the Internet. If you come to my blog, you come to my house and you are welcome. I make my friends there and I branch out from there to find the places those people call home.
Recently there is much talk of blogging as a business, to make money, worrying about stats and advertising rates and the scourge of follow/nofollow links. Blogging has become about fitting a niche. I think it’s a sure fire way to kill the joy myself. I think blogland would be better if everyone sought to carve their own niche. I truly believe that when brands have moved on to the next PR buzz and the internet has shaken itself to its next incarnation, it will be the people who wrote blogs for personal reasons who’ll remain. And they’ll keep blogging regardless of free products, advertising opportunities or becoming celebrities in the ‘blogosphere’. The people who have a purpose that matters to them, who speak with their own voice and who tell a story – it will be those blogs which will be the internet content worth having – a recorded hive mind of experience. They’ll pull people into them, into the conversation and community with the voice that comes from longevity and truth and character.
There is one phrase, stemming from the early days of Big Brother, that comes back to me quite often when I see people worrying about Google doing this, or brands offering or asking that and it’s this one: “It’s only a game show”. It’s exactly that. Blogging is for fun, by and large – a hobby, a game, an entertainment, a release of the need to communicate and be heard. To take it more seriously than that is to risk losing sight of the very reason we should do it. A few months ago a friend pointed me to a quirky poster on Despair.com
“Blogging: never has so much been said, by so many, to so few.”
I have it as my desk top screen. It’s an excellent way to keep perspective 
About Sally
Sally Whittle is founder of the Tots100, Foodies100, BlogSummit and the MAD Blog Awards. When she's not working, she can be found blogging at Who's the Mummy, or having fun with her 7 year old daughter, Flea.
So so true, you’ve put into words more eloquent than mine exactly what I feel about blogging. I blog for me and whoever chooses to read my thoughts. I honestly don’t really understand the popularity contest and business side, it steals the joy in my opinion. Thanks for sharing, it’s a great start to the day.
Thank you
I love it when people tell me I’m eloquent, so much better than bletherer 
(Which is generally equally true!)
Just stolen that poster to remind me
Makes me laugh such a lot!
This is exactly the reason why I recently started a new blog. My “mummy blog” was becoming very geared toward reviews and dealing with brands, and I was becoming obsessed with stats and scores and ranks.
My new blog is totally for me. And ironically, in its mere 3 weeks of existence, it is actually the same or better in every ranking already. And I’ve been getting many more comments because I am writing with my true voice and not worrying about offending brands or PRs.
Well, I think that says an awful lot really
I don’t mind mixed blogs at all, I like to ‘know’ the person reviewing so I can decide if it would also suit me. But I spent ages going through blogs this week and some of them felt like the balance had taken the person out of it a bit too much.
We all love working with brands, and there’s nothing wrong with being proud of that.
But as Merry says, it’s good to remember what we love about blogging itself, why we started – and to make sure we enjoy it along the way.
And I definitely do (though I don’t get much chance to be honest ) and in some respects as a business owner I am one. I just feel sad when I hear people worrying more about the how and why of blogging than having a life and happening to blog it
Blogging is a journey .. That I hope to enjoy for many a time x
With lots of twists and turns. I tend to think ‘so long as I look back and am glad I wrote this post in my body of work, I’m happy.
This is by far, one of the best blog posts I’ve read for quite some time. What works for one in blogging doesn’t work for another but over the past 12 months, Bloggers have become increasingly competitive which has taken so much fun out of blogging. It’s very rare these days to land on a parent blog and not find a review or sponsored post – each to their own, none of us are here to judge – but once the PR’s/SEO’s etc have found something else to feed their bank balances, these bloggers will start to struggle with maintaining their blog. And as some of them are extremely well written, that’s a shame.
I’ve never done anything on my blog other than write about my own family, my life, issues that affect me and so on, and the day I feel I can no longer continue in this way will be the day I close down my blog.
The fury, irritation, frustration, not to mention work that goes into maintaining a blog in order to please an outside company will never be worth it in the long run because that isn’t what blogging was originally created for.
CJ x
Oh golly.
I think I might just have popped with pride
Thank you 
This post couldn’t have come at a better time this morning. I started my blog 3 years ago, just for me, and although the last 6 months have been a whirlwind having joined up with the blogging community including the Tots100, and seeing a rapid increase in readership, it has made me slightly obsessive about the stats. I’ve also started reading more other blogs and it’s increased the pressure to do just as well.
I don’t do PR/Brand stuff – never been asked. But I do write reviews. I only write reviews of products or holidays or days out when I want to share our experiences with my readers. The places/companies that I review don’t even know I’ve reviewed them generally. And I like that, as I can be totally honest.
Thanks for reminding me what it’s all about. Writers write because they can’t not. It’s part of who they are. And stats can’t take that away.
You know one of the things that makes me really proud? I know that several people have booked a holiday at Lower Hookner Farm, a place I utterly love and write about just because I love it, based on my posts about it. That pleases me so much, far more than any paid review ever.