Openly Feminist

By the way, I started a new blog titled Openly Feminist.

I am doing it in Bulgarian and write about dumb tv shows, articles I read and various things that grab my attention through a feminist perspective. I felt that I needed to do it because, in my humble opinion, many Bulgarians are very much feminist in their world-views and at the same time are TERRIFIED of being perceived as feminist. I figured that if I came out...maybe others would do too. I worry that I will be ridiculed (like I am most of the times when I do speak up against sexist remarks/jokes/practies and so on). But at the same time I am willing to take my chances. Who knows, maybe I will be surprised.

I will try to publish Enlgish versions of my posts here and vice versa. Wish me luck.

Six years ago

Six years ago today I created a little html-file in Dreamweaver and sent a hopeful, somewhat desparate message out to the world. I naively thought that I had things to say and that there were people who would be willing to listen.

Today I send a special shout-out to Var for sending me my first ever reader email. He wrote me a note...not too long after I had first started blogging to tell me that he found me and that he liked my site and that he was Bulgarian too. I don't remember much else. But I definitely remember feeling like a million bucks (in euro). Who would have thought, though, that 6 years later, we would be kicking each other under the table every day. His cubicle is right next to mine and I've got reeeeeeally long legs.

Seriously, though, thank you. Thank you all for listening. Thank you for sticking around. But most of all, thank you for talking back.

It's been a riot!

Guilty Pleasures

Melissa tagged me to do a meme about my guilty pleasures (hi, M!).

I used to hate memes. They too much remind of being in elementary schools and writing in my friends journals which always felt more like pressure that fun. You would want to stay truthful to your SELF but also would have to try so hard to be unique AND creative and nothing kills creativity faster than the desire to be creative in public. Recently, I’ve come around, though. I’ve realized that memes are actually a pretty fantastic way to take a quick look at yourself and have a good laugh. So here is my slightly shortened version on this (for explanation why, see #3 below).

My six guilty pleasures:

1. Our apartment is very humid and that made our front door swell up a little bit. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to close it so we got our landlord’s permission to slam it as hard as we need to. Every morning, when I leave for work, I ask Prof. Grady to come close the door after me because it’s easier for him to do it. I do feel guilty for asking because, actually, it is really not THAT difficult. BUT it gives me so much pleasure to have his smiley face be the last thing I see when I head for the office. Gives my day such a great start.

2. I constantly scour other people’s blogrolls for interesting new bloggers to read and admire. It’s tons of fun but it makes me feel totally guilty for not having a blogroll of my own. I just have never been able to figure out how to do that. Do I include only my friends’ blogs? But some of my favorite blogs are of people I do not know…Also, I go through periods where I obsess over one particular blog and then completely forget about it for months. Sometimes I return back to it, sometimes it doesn’t. Not a simple decision at all.

3. I often blog while at work. I do it when I need a break and/or things have temporarily slowed down. I do feel guilty about it because I know I could easily be doing something more productive but I keep reminding myself that people relax differently so it’s ok.

4. I love to eat Nutella straight out of the jar.

5. I do have a bit of a People Dot Com problem. Star Tracks is by far my most favorite section. Followed closely by their more recent addition of They Said What?

6. I worry that 50 cent’s In Da Club might be my favorite song of all times.

Now, I’d really love to have the following six people list 6 guilty pleasures of their own:

1. Prof. Grady
2. Dr. J
3. Fran
4. Steve
5. Erika
6. Everyone who feels like listing their own: either as a comment or on their own blog. Just be sure to let us know you’re doing it!

Wheeeeeeee!

What am I getting myself into?!

Not sure, really. But after seeing that Fran signed up for it, I decided to do so myself! So...yeah...I will be participating in National Blog Posting Month. The real question is...will YOU?

Please let me know if the answer is YES.

Good things recently

I've been meaning to do this for quite a while now:

1: I now blog for Bulgarian Amica. It's a cosy little space. By women, for women.

2: I have been 100% successful in staying away from my Bloglines account before noon. It really is amazing how much one can get done in just a couple of hours.

3: I have almost completely stopped checking my traffic reports. I learn interesting/funny things about my readers when I do check, but I realized that I had actually started to fall into the whole popularity trap...Was almost starting to confuse traffic with quality, which, let's be honest...is pretty pathetic.

4: My workplace and I...we've fallen in love all over again.

5: When I start to feel a little tired, I spritz a little bit of kiehl's rosewater on my face. It wakes me up immediately and smells SOOO nice!!!

What have you been up to? Give us all an update!!!

Blog notes

Here are some thoughts provoked by the latest BlogShop that I announced but did not really talk about last week.

First, like I already mentioned, Varzonovtsev, Peio and also Ivo have already shared their thoughts on the use of corporate and personal blogs. Their entries summarize their presentations: Var's about corporate and Peio's about personal weblogs, respectively. Unfortunately, there is no written record of Elenko and Bobby Kandov's presentation on media weblogs. The only written record of it, are my notes (spelling mistakes and coffee stains included). All three presentations and the Q&A session were pretty good, I thought. If I had to do it again, I would have picked only one type of blogs to talk about as there was simply no time to cover all three we'd chosen. Also, the forum was largely attended by IT-people representing their companies...so perhaps we should have left personal blogs out of the panel. But that's ok. Peio is always fun to listen to, so, yeah.


As the seminar is long gone and most conversations on the topic have already died out, I would like to draw some attention to three points that all of the authors implicitly agreed upon but have not really mentioned explicitly in the presentations I just referenced.

1] It is generally a good idea to know WHY you have a blog. What is its purpose? What is its goal? When I say goal, I really don't mean anything too specific. Your goal depends on your blog (corporate, media, personal). Your goal could be to hike up your sales, attract new clients, lower your client communication costs, gather an audience, stroke your ego, find your future husband, whatever.

2] It is difficult to define whether a particular blog is "successful". Traditionally, a blog's success is measured by the number of unique visitors it attracts and the number of links that lead to it. Those metrics, however, albeit not completely meaningless, are not always relevant. To measure whether a blog is successful is really an exercise in evaluating how completely it is achieving its predefined goals. 'Evaluating how completely it is achieving its predefined goals' does not relate to a straighforward technique of evaluation. However, the larger point remains that one needs to first and foremost know why a blog was created to begin with before beginning to judge how successful it is.

3] Time and timing are important factors to the development of a blog. It takes time to start it up. It takes time to keep it up. It takes time for your blog to get noticed. It takes time before you figure out what the fuck you've gotten yourself into. At the same time, you are expected to move fast, deliver stories pretty frequently, respond to reader feedback as soon as you can.

I realize that these three points are pretty obvious. However, I think it is important to keep them to the forefront for many reasons. As we go through our personal blogging routines, I think we all tend to compare ourselves to the best and brightest out there. That, sometimes, works as a motivating factor. We push ourselves to create unique content that others can relate to and that gives an amazing sense of personal fulfillment that's difficult to describe. Other times, however, it makes us give up and feel like total blogosphere failures (oh! the horror!).

As a clinically certified blog-addict, I tend to get all kinds of people excited about starting to blog. They write for a couple of weeks, enthusiastically at first, but the number of entries inevitably starts to decrease. Before you know it, what had started as this new exciting thing, turns into an awful disappointment. And that's clearly not something anyone would like experience. For that reason, I think those three little things I mentioned above are helpful to remember.