I have a ton of blog posts to write today, but before I dive in and get started, I have to work out some thoughts that are jumbling around in my head. Please feel free to leave comments, but I want to say one thing- this post is NOT about paid posts. I’m not wrestling with my decision to monetize my blog. Rather, I’m thinking about this blog in general, as a whole, as a brand, and what I want it to say about me as a person, as a blogger. And about how I want to interact with the blogosphere.

See? Told you right up there in the title that I was having Deep Thoughts!

What prompted all of this was a visit I paid yesterday to a blog I’ve been reading for well over a year, one that has become extremely popular and rightfully so. She recently did a new redesign of her site, and it didn’t take me long to realize what was different. See, quite often when we start a new blog, we are all about letting visitors know where we see ourselves within the greater blogging community. We put up a blogroll and badges and links to other sites to say “these are the sites that I relate to”.

And there’s nothing wrong with doing that, of course. But what I have noticed, going into my third year of blogging, is that many of the blogs that were already established when I started have began to move away from blogrolls and badges and links to other sites. Instead, they become self-promotional, with the main page displaying just information about the author and their content.

Which leads me to wonder, what does it really mean to be a blogger? Is it just about promoting yourself, or is there a greater obligation to also promote the community that one’s blog belongs to? We all want other blogs to link to us, yet we don’t want to give away too much of our own precious sidebar space to linking back. The blogger that I referred to who did the site redesign has almost no links going out on her main page. She has her recent posts, her archives, and a link to her Flickr page. There’s no indication of where she sees herself within the greater blogging community, which leads me to another question-

Isn’t that the whole point of a personal blog, to focus on oneself? With all of the sites out there urging us in 36-point font to JOIN US! CREATE YOUR PROFILE PAGE! BE A MEMBER!, at what point to we spread ourselves so thinly that we forget where we were at the beginning? I have profile pages at so many different social networking sites, that I don’t have time to actually interact with any of the people who have befriended me on them.

But, I’m digressing. How we use our blogs, what we choose to put on our pages, who we choose to link to, all of that comes down to personal decisions. What works for one blogger isn’t necessarily going to work for another. Join groups, don’t join groups, link to other sites, don’t link to other sites. There’s no one formula that guarantees blog success. I’m not sure I’ll ever figure out my “place” in the blogosphere, I know I’ll eventually get tired of looking at the banner image in the header and look for something else, and I know I’ll constantly tinker with my sidebars. I’ll always hope for comments on posts and be thrilled when someone adds my blog to their blogroll.

I seem to have run out of thoughts. Have I mentioned that Chris is in Toronto on business, has been gone since last Thursday and won’t get home until this Friday night? All this non-stop parenting and housekeeping is using up my limited supply of brain cells Thanks for reading, my friends. I’m taking a short break and then I will be back with two DVD reviews and a Scholastic book giveaway. On MomReviews I have reviews of a CD and two DVDs to do, plus a giveaway of some cool new trading cards for girls. On MomCooks, I have this week’s Menu Plan to figure out! Plus parenting and stuff. Onward and forward.