In the sea of gravatars, yours might not stand out much. As a matter of fact, it may have expired!

Your gravatar is not a postage stamp, that you slap on each blog post with such speed and sporadic turn that can leave someone dizzy.

I wonder how a blogger can go from liking one blog post to fifteen blog posts in 2 minutes flat? How possible is that?

On a serious note, no one expects that you will read all the blog posts out there. That’s not only impossible, but a suicide mission.

However, you have to make a bit of an attempt to engage with your friends, otherwise, they will never get to be your friends, because you will remain on the periphery of the blog chain. A fairly vague face or name, if at all.

This is one of the reasons that I feel so uncomfortable just sticking a ‘LIKE’ on a blog written in only a language that I cannot understand.

It makes me feel like a cheat and I simply don’t like that. I have even gone to extra lengths of dropping a line for the blogger and suggesting from a readers point of view, if they could at least just put an English title so that one has an idea what the whole thing is all about, but nope! Not even a response from any of them. Oh well!

With the amount of stress out there and a long list of blogs to read, it will not be easy on anyone to take the extra time each single moment to translate a blog post. Let’s call a spade what it is. A big, hard spade.

How does a blogger foster growth if they don’t engage with the readers and friends that they have made?

All the hard work that goes into preparing a blog is wasted if no one is reading it or commenting on it.

I would rather engage two decent readers than a blog full of gravatars.

Yes of course, there are days that we see a post and  we have nothing to say, so we leave a tiny footprint of a like.

However, there are some, whose style is bulldozing through blogs with lightning speed and on a consistent basis.

Some are so rude that they won’t even bother commenting on a post, but the simply say  ‘hey, come and check out my xyz post, it’s awesome’ and they stick on their URL without as much as a hey ho!

That is rudeness. It can be compared with going to someones’ house and barging in without knocking. It’s only burglars that do that.

That it’s a blog and online does not mean courtesy is dead.

For your information, to those few who barge in rudely, it’s not cute and secondly, everyone else is equally busy. So behave yourself!

We blog with integrity and the primary objective is to impact on those around us positively no matter how little that is.

I think that we shouldn’t lose sight of the objectives of what we are doing, which is to enrich lives, creativity, fulfillment, tranquility and not excluding making something economically meaningful of the effort if the opportunity arises.

If it’s just about crunching numbers, then be prepared to be frustrated and wear out fast, because that is not what pays over time.

What pays over time, is the building of relationships, as fleeting as online relationships might seem.

Blogging is a lifestyle like a lot of other social skills. It is not a sprint, but a long enduring marathon, where you walk when you tire, take a sip of water, pace yourself, listen to music and hobble along.

My two cents.

This is for those bloggers who go from one season to another, slapping their gravatars on posts like postage stamp.

© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha