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People often ask me what I do and when I tell them, they say “oh, you’re a blogger.”

Ahem. Let me say that again. I write for a company that publishes several ebusiness publications, but mainly for just the flagship. But don’t confuse me with what is typically thought of as a blogger. I use the shift key and punctuation. Generally, I write with complete sentences unless I can justify it artistically. My grammar–on the first go ’round–is often impeccable, as is my spelling. I have standards, a background, degrees, certifications.

I am a writer, and I am stuck-up about it.

And sometimes I blog, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Yes, I did begin a sentence with a conjunction. Want to make something of it?

But I don’t consider myself, not full time anyway, a blogger. Anyone can blog; not everybody has something to say.

What’s the difference between being a writer and a blogger? That’s a tough question. Seems to me like nobody’s been able to define exactly what a blog is, much less a blogger. The blog got its name from web log, as everybody knows. It intimates a kind of journal or diary. Informal, random, unreserved, impassioned, and a bit of a glimpse into someone’s private mind.

For example, I like my toast lightly toasted, not dark. Don’t burn it. Burnt bacon is okay, though.

I generally feel like my parents were full of it when they told me to be a gentleman and put girls on a pedastel like I’m some genteel south’n trust fund baby and not the rogue I always had the potential to be. Chicks in college hated that stuff! My wife kind of likes it though. All that door-opening and seat-pulling got me pretty far in Japan, too, where chivalry’s never been alive enough to have been killed off by the feminist movement.

See, intimate.

A writer, a self-respecting one, a journalist or prose writer has a high horse and printing press. While you notice a blogger’s self, and even his writing skill, the better a writer is, the less you notice him in what is written and the more you notice the story–it’s a substance over style thing. The writer is copyrighted, sensitive about it, and gets paid if he’s lucky, and if really lucky sees work in print somewhere. But most of all he suffers for his art; he doesn’t slap words up on a screen. Yes, all that’s changing and yes it’s becoming harder and harder to tell the difference anymore.

When the government went after Larry Flint, the publisher of Hustler, a famous question was asked about how to tell the difference between art and pornography. The famous answer was: I know it when I see it.

Most bloggers don’t write this much in a post because the Internet has a short attention span. So if you’ve made it this far, let me reward you with the declaration of my own BS. Often the rules of anything are there to keep people down. When writing has rules, when we separte ourselves along arbitrary elitist lines, we not only become predictable as writers but we also ascribe to a system designed to stifle voices rather than set them free.

so blog on bloggers and do it however you wish so long as you contribute to the grander conversation.

I’ll still call myself a writer, though.

Tags: Blogging //