Even though I've managed to keep up with this blog for a little over a year now, I still find blogging to be a fairly odd concept. While I do feel like it's a great method to gather exposure for your writing or your products if you're a company, I think there is still a bit of a societal mental block out there regarding blogging. My personal block probably comes out of the fact that I honestly stumbled into this writing medium. One semester as an elective I decided to take a class that was described as a magazine focused subject matter, something that was supposedly going to help you develop the skills to successfully write those longer articles. Well I apparently missed the memo or misread something because I walked into the class and discovered that it was actually going to be focused on blogging. Granted the professor actually worked for a major magazine, flying into the Pittsburgh every week to teach this class, so he probably based the class on what he was seeing in the industry.
Whatever the reasoning behind the class was, it took a lot for me to really wrap my head around this particular writing concept especially since I had never given blogging much thought. My only real exposure to it before the class was a couple of high school friends who used the forum more as an online diary than a focused subject matter. I was also mildly thrown by the fact that I had to create a blog for the class. It's one thing to spend a couple of days (or an all nighter the night before it was actually due) trying to come up with a successful piece of writing, it's another to dedicate a couple of hours every day to be able to post on a regular basis. I think it's that combination of being able to dedicate the time to keeping the posts up and finding a subject to really focus on without going to far off the "personal" deep end that gets most people blocked. When I originally found this sticker, part of me really hoped that the missing letter from the first word would be a J. I kind of liked the idea of a company being called Jaded Industry, although I have no idea what you would sell for it. But in the end the name ended up being Faded Industry and pretty easily found. Faded Industry is a local company that is... well a bit of a hodge podge of things. They do promotional work for events, artists, products, and a couple of other things typically associated with the entertainment industry. They sell products and artwork on their Big Cartel site. It also seems like a fair amount of their time is spent working to promote a couple of alcohol brands like Clique Vodak, which would make since they merged with Premier Innovations Group a while back. Their site also occasionally publishes different articles where they write about various events and subjects that they find interesting. Their latest posts focused on the recent Thrival Festival back in September, although I can't tell if it's because it's a local event they feel deserves attention or if they are tied to it in some way. While the posts to the actual website may be infrequent, they are a large presence on Facebook and Twitter. I think a big reason for this may just be because it's easier to reach your target audience on these social media outlets than to make them regularly check your site. I know I generally find out what's going on around the city through Facebook more than any where else. It's also probably because being able to dedicate a lot of time to writing interesting and relevant pieces for your blog or site can get to be a difficult thing to balance. I feel like this is a big thing you find on a lot of these types of sites. They started the blog but then realized they needed to dedicate their time elsewhere. But I am impressed that they are at least keeping up with it, even if it is only a couple of times a year.
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Maggie Ondrey
An amateur photographer and writer capturing a small portion of the city. Archives
August 2017
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