I've been blogging for some four years know and although I've had my ups and downs I don't regret any single moment of it. Blogging changed my life (it was while blogging that I met my girlfriend) and blogging also helped improve my language skills (English and Portuguese alike), that single talent that makes my work a palatable one (I'm a free-lance translator, by the way). Furthermore, blogging made me curious about the internet as a whole (a reality of which I had sparse, little and insufficient knowledge) and about new techs in general and that also helped my daily life, the first rate example being the proper handling of Trados, one of the main tools of my business. Now, as I've written before, blogging has its downfalls; it's time consuming, remits you to a parallel reality, it may be addictive and, worse of all – it's non-profitable (for most bloggers, not all, that is).
Anyway, not being an ambitious person moneywise speaking (quite the opposite), I've always regarded blogging as great fun and, besides, being an adventurer by nature, that button you can find in your navbars (not in mine, sorry), the next blog button, from time to time, tends to seduce me and every now and again I embark on blogging expeditions, going where no blogger has gone before, exploiting the deepest corners of the blogosphere, may they be in China or Saint Helen's island and, every year or two, I stumble upon interesting blogging projects.
This, in turn, brings me to the title of this post. A few days back, on a random cruise through the blogosphere via next blog button, I came upon Grace's blog. Now, me and Grace, we have nothing in common. For starters, she's a believer and I'm an atheist; then she's a mother of two and I'm a father of none; she's an American living in Maine and I'm Portuguese living in my mind, and then she's just started blogging and I… Well, I will not repeat myself on that subject.
Nonetheless, there was something about Grace's blog: politeness, education, truthfulness.
In Grace's post I came across she was asking for some help on a (for me) trivial blogging issue and I couldn't resist. And so I blogged her back some help on the issue and guess what, it felt good.
And then, while cruising back to more familiar edges of the web, it struck me: blogging is not only about writing unbelievable weird texts full of exotic words; it surely isn't only about making money, and it surely isn't about that stupid sense of self-gratification: uh, look at me, I'm so original when I write, I'm bound to dazzle everyone else.
No, not really. Blogging is mainly about sharing and, through sharing, learning with everyone else.
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