Well, with it being the New Year, and many of you/us thinking about shedding holiday poundage, I thought it appropos to point out an article I found about dieting blogs. The Galveston Daily News (the oldest newspaper in Texas, I might add — Go Bobcats!) has an interesting article about how dieting blogs, and more importantly, blogging about dieting might help those interested in losing weight shed those extra pounds.
One of the main thrusts seems to be that by blogging, and exposing your own thoughts, feelings, and frustrations about the travails of losing weight, you’ll able to garner support through fellow bloggers, and more importantly a sense of accountability.
While the intentions are good, I feel that the article is a bit misleading.
Why is this?
Mostly because it gives the impression that these aspects of community are easy to achieve with blogging. The sense of support and accountability are easy enough when you’ve established a following and when you have a regular readership. However, for anyone to start something on their own through blogger, for example, they will undoubtedly be disappointed if they expect that these instant aspects of community will magically appear; rather, the hard realities of blogging are more likely lead to yet another blog start, then stopping.
To build a community around a blog, and to get other bloggers blogging about your own issues, requires that one actually build a blog worth reading and following. To any blogger who has been doing this for more than a few months, they’ll know that its much easier said than done. Regular posts, great content, and participation in other blogging communities are all necessary, but not always sufficient for this to occur.
At the end of the day, blogging is one solution for support and accountability, albeit one that needs the adjusting of expectations.  I think that the article, however, would have done a better service focusing on already-ready communities and tools to help individuals lose weight; for example, traineo is a web2.0 tool that has all the usual tools that enable one to lose weight such as weight logs, forums, and ways to meet like minded weight loss seekers, but it also has an extra tool of inviting up to four “friends” to watch your success — and keep you accountable!
