Notes from the Trail

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

As I was saying in the last post, Hugh Hewitt’s book Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation was a challenge and provocation for me. The more I reflected on it after reading it, the more I realized that in many ways my blog was, well, bland. 

I hate to admit that to myself, because I feel that I’ve been pretty informative, encouraging, challenging and even edgy (heck, who else do you know that writes about butt boils?). However, I have rarely written about topics that are controversial. I have for the most part steered clear of politics (except for last year’s sales tax debacle). And I have been very vocal about my faith and love for Jesus Christ. It is the absolute foundation of all that I do.

Yet, Hewitt’s book bothered me. In a nutshell, it caused me to consider whether my writings were really influencing readers - or if they were merely informing readers. 

When I was running MonticelloLive.com, I chose to not only report news but to dig deeper beneath our community’s noise and try to see what was making things “tick” and “go bump in the night.” I learned a lot about some people’s motives, ideals and agendas. Some of those were encouraging; some were disconcerting.

The times that I wrote editorials (1, 2, 3), I got quite a bit of negative feedback from some leaders in town and even from a few Christians. The gist of their complaint was that I was a pastor, and that I shouldn’t be saying the things I was saying. It’s quite a turn of events to realize that just 100 years ago, pastors were the moral leaders and opinion influencers in their communities. Heck, 500 years ago, pastors were the primary civic leaders and engines of community life. (Can you say Martin Luther or John Calvin?!) Imagine what things would be like politically and religiously if they had listened to folks tell them that pastors should just preach and not get involved!

That brings me full circle to what I am have wrestling with. It’s been obvious over the past year that local news outlets choose simply to report news. It’s like a reflex. Something happens; someone writes about it. There is not much of an effort to dig deep and find news. Truly getting involved and seeking to contribute to community life, however, requires more than that. 

Edmund Burke said, 

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”  (Wayne Greeson has an excellent sermon on this topic here.)

It’s not just evil that triumphs when good people do nothing. Ignorance prevails. I think it’s time to do something. How about you? (to be continued)

I’ve been reading Hugh Hewitt’s book called Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation. Published in 2004, it’s already old when it comes to naming the most popular blogs and opinion influencers. However, as for understanding the foundation and background of blogging as the tsunami of information influence, he is dead on.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever read a Hewitt book that I didn’t like. I’ve read In But Not Of, The Embarrassed Believer, and now Blog.

Hewitt’s book Blog is a feast for the writer-turned-blogger and the wannabe. It not only explains how now is the best time to start and maintain a blog but also describes the potential power, influence, and plain old fun of blogging. 

However, it’s not just informational. It’s inspirational. 

Blog header from 2005

I started this blog, Notes from the Trail, in September of 2005. It was on the 10th of that month that I opened a Typepad account and began posting stuff that I’d written in the past. I posted things I’d written in high school, college, and other essays and poems. I began to carve out a niche for myself on the net, and soon discovered that my years of journaling had prepared me to become an almost-daily blogger. 

I knew next to nothing about HTML, PHP or web design at the time. I could barely squeak by. However, when people began interacting with my writing - in comments on my blog and via email, I knew that this medium held immense promise for relational impact and skill development. I was “all in.”

I moved my blogging platform to a self-hosted Wordpress format and have never looked back.

Hewitt says that the blogosphere is a place where you can “peddle your text wares.” There have been many instances in the past three years that all I’ve felt like I’ve done in blogging is “peddling.” Spinning my wheels comes to mind. It’s that uncomfortable sense that all the mind investment, creative wording, and research is simply going down a black hole. It’s the old “nobody likes me; everybody hates me; I’ll think I’ll go out back and eat some worms” routine.

Then one day, you realize that you’re emailing and conversing with people that you would never have met if you hadn’t begun blogging. Here are a few for me: Richard, Andy, Tim, Scott, Sunny, Alan, Grant, Wade, Ed, Shelley, Rosjuane, Kenny, TeamPyro, Mark, Terry, John and.. well, you get the picture (and please forgive me if you didn’t get mentioned!).

On the other hand, I can also count multiple folks that may have been influenced to begin blogging by my pitiful attempts. I don’t want to list them, because I might embarrass myself when they comment that I had nothing to do with it. (If I have helped, inspired your blogging though, I’d love to hear about it!)

Since 2005, I also began and have since sold a community website called MonticelloLive.com which is getting astounding traffic only two years after its creation - well over 2000 visitors a day (for a town of 9000) and more than 4000 pageviews per day.

All that to say.. Hewitt’s book did not convince me of the power and benefits of blogging - both personal and professional (I was already convinced). However, it has caused me to significantly rethink how I blog - and what I blog about. If you’re a frequenter of Notes from the Trail, you’ll know that I blog about the same random topics, depending on the time of the year: faith in Jesus Christ, church, Apple computers and iPhones, technology and internet, relationships, fantasy football, and home happenings.

I assign every story a “category” (forgive me for being basic if you’re a blogger extraordinaire) for filing and finding purposes. My categories were created to stick with the “trail” theme and have always been called:

• Parchments - for books I’m reading or have reviewed
• Homestead Happenings - stuff around the house with wifey and kids
• Campfire Talk - rarely used, but intended for heart-to-hearts 
• Church Chew - entries about Christianity and church
• Goin’ to Town - for technology and city-type stuff
• Shootn the Bull - for general silliness
• Spiritual Markers - for entries about faith and spirituality

All of the above have suited me well for the past three years, but as I consider some of Hewitt’s observations, I realize that… (to be continued)