While scanning the magazine rack at a craft store this past week, Somerset Studio’s Artful Bloggin: Visually Inspiring Online Journals caught my eye and since I was in a rush, I bought the magazine.
I can’t quite decide how I feel about the magazine. There are interviews with bloggers and then sample pages and in this case images from their blogs. The intended audience is the visual arts community and those who are thinking of this type of artistic expression. The magazine also has a blogging primer in how to get started and blog etiquette. It also invites bloggers to submit to the magazine so that they can be featured in upcoming issues. All great ideas.
What is my hesitancy?
I think first that there is a book that showcases the blogs of others. I suppose it is an introduction to this electronic medium and will encourage others to try blogging as a means to express their creativity and showcase their own work.
I think the showcasing of work is another issue for me. Almost everyone who was featured has a website where he or she is selling his or her own work. The blog is then, in my humble opinion, a marketing tool. Is there anything wrong with that? I don’t know.
Is it just jealousy on my part that I don’t currently have the time to have a separate blog on just art and creativity and I certainly don’t have the time to create art that is up to saleable quality on a regular, sustainable basis? Perhaps.
I just don’t know. What I do know is that blogging is becoming an integral part of our culture and will expand in ways that we can’t even envision now.
