Most of you know – either because you participated yourself, or because you just couldn’t escape all the posts from bloggers who were participating – that last week was Book Blogger Appreciation Week.
The 2011 BBAW theme was “Cultivating a Community of Bloggers and Readers.” I posted according to the daily BBAW prompts on four of the five days, and had a wonderful time re-connecting with old book-blogging friends and getting to know new ones, which was what I hoped to get out of the week. It’s left me feeling re-committed to keeping up better with the many blogs I follow and commenting on them more often – how long I can keep up that commitment remains to be seen, but I’ll give it my best effort!
(In non-BBAW programming, Monday’s post wrapped up the group read of The Handmaid’s Tale.)
Wednesday and Friday of BBAW were both “tips” days – Wednesday’s regarding finding and maintaining community, Friday’s about blogging. There was some overlap in bloggers’ suggestions for both topics, particularly concerning things like commenting and using Twitter. But as I was leaving someone a comment on Friday, I was reminded of something I forgot to mention, but that also ties those things together.
One reason I leave fewer comments than perhaps I could is that if I don’t feel like I have something “quality” to add to the conversation on a particular post, I won’t post a comment just for the sake of doing it. However, what I will do is try to bring other people into the conversation – I’ll share the link to that post.
I used to post link roundups pretty regularly here, and I really like putting them together, but I just haven’t been able to keep up with them for the last few months. If you need a weekly links fix, get to know Chrisbookarama‘s “Friday Bookish Buzz” if you haven’t already!
(See what I just did right there?)
I may start my links feature back up one of these days, but in the meantime, I’ve come to like the immediacy of sharing links straight from my feed reader. We’ve talked about using Twitter to broadcast your own posts, but you can broadcast other people’s too – and if you have space, add a brief comment and “@” the blogger when you tweet their link. Both of my preferred readers, Feedly and Reeder, have the functionality to send tweets (with shortened links) direct from the application, and I rely on that. They also enable link-sharing on Facebook, Tumblr, and a variety of other social-media services.
To sum up, here’s my bonus BBAW tip for both blogging and community-nurturing:
There are a lot of people who may not have time to follow many blogs, but one of the ways they use Twitter is as a feed reader…so feed them. Or give your Facebook friends some recommended reading. Share the love – share a link!
BBAW was also a factor in the Great Irony of Book Blogging – the more time one spends in blogging-related activity, the less time one has available for reading books! Aside from a couple of hours I had on my own yesterday, I didn’t get much reading done this week that wasn’t on my computer or my iPhone. Therefore, I have no Bookkeeping to post – but I have no regrets about how I spent the past week, either.
Here’s to keeping that spirit of appreciation going! And in that spirit, I appreciate the bag my husband brought back for me yesterday from the event he was photographing (a pre-Emmy Awards “gifting suite,” a/k/a a swagfest – and no, this was not swag, sadly, just a holder for some):
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| my first Instagram photo |
