Blogging....

By Matt Owens

I myself had never blogged before sometime last year. The idea of blogging to me sounded like a bunch of over opinionated people with too much time on their hands ranting about stuff hoping someone else in the world with just as much time on their hands had the same views and would read their ranting’s. I stayed away from blogs all together. Last year that changed, I didn’t just start blogging I was actually involved in creating a blog.

Along with some of my friends from undergrad at UIC we started our own blog. We all still lived in the Chicago area, some of us working for firms others attending graduate school. We were all over the city and had different schedules, very busy schedules, and we did not get together too often. Our main form of communication was through email. As we all know architecture involves a lot of sitting in front of a computer, so this was an effective way of staying connected. We would send out emails with every one copied on it, so we could all see what we was going on. Emails consisted of architecture of course, what we were doing in school, what we were working on in the office, something interesting someone read, a cool new project somewhere in the world. The emails were also about other stuff too, like a new restaurant, a show, music, and where the party was at that weekend. It was cool that we could all still share ideas and keep connected, but it wasn’t cool that my inbox was getting slammed with emails. It started to get confusing, email strings would go on and on, new emails, old email; it was getting difficult to tell who was talking about what. It was suggested we start a blog to get things organized; we could use the blog as a platform to share. We would all have ability to upload material as we please, and be able to comment and discuss things through the blog. We didn’t care if we were the only people to visit the blog we just wanted to clean up our inboxes.

So we set out using BlogSpot, same as what we are using here. It was great; we could do everything we were doing with the emails and more. We had fun, it wasn’t just about architecture, we blogged about music, art, food, entertainment, and anything else. We were even sharing more, anything we found interesting we would post in on the blog. It went strong till the beginning of summer this year. A few more of the group went to grad school including myself and started to have less time for the blog and it was summer, we were at the beach. Sadly there has been maybe half a dozen posts on the blog since this May. I have changed my view on blogging. I was completely ignorant, but have come to see it differently now.

I wanted to share my blog experience with you all for this first post. I want to let you know that this will be cool and that we should have fun with this! I also want to share with you an article I read on a blog last year about rules for an architect’s blog. http://www.lifeofanarchitect.com/rules-for-an-architects-blog/ The article is not very long but if you don’t want to read it at least check out the list of rules for an architect’s blog at the bottom, also check out the little quips about Write, Kahn, and Corbusier on the side too, pretty interesting. Maybe this can be of some help when thinking about what to post in the future.