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Garden Bloggers, Future Past

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While we hear the main stream media bemoan the advent of blogs, you have to wonder what we missed over the years. This is one reason why garden bloggers are becoming more and more important to the gardening world. They are the ones bringing up subjects that we need to address in our businesses.-Trey, The Blogging Nurseryman


Trey wrote another provocative post that got my thinking juices flowing, helped along by a comment by Doug Green, who certainly is expert in the garden world on many levels.

See? this is why I love the blogging world 🙂

Other garden related comments from this morning had to do with the demise of favorite garden magazines. I have mixed feelings on this. In a way, all media is going through a sifting process. As it switches from the patriarchal type of oversight of “what the people need to hear and how they need to hear it” to “the user lets you know what is needed” we are seeing lots of ‘growing pains’. Doug wrote on this phenomenon starting in his post,”What I’ve Learned From Garden Blogging”.

With the addition of Twitter, blogging is quite powerful in moving information and making it widely available. Now, how you want to use it is up to you, but that alone is a tremendous resource for businesses. Data, real time people created data, gives you information on becoming more efficient as a business while becoming more of a service to your customer. That is win-win. That is a beneficial use of technology, I think.

As for magazines, I don’t think they are going away, but I think the refinement process is going to consolidate them into something that people truly want enough to pay for. The age of profligate consumerism is over, and with it the luxury of having many choices that end up as waste. For some that is something to mourn, and for others something to celebrate, but that is our present reality. We are entering a new day in many ways, and I suppose we need to read the horizon to understand what we are going to face today.

But, as gardeners, we ought to be used to that.

Thanks Trey, for again rendering service to the garden blogging community (and others!).

About Ilona Erwin

I was a garden blog pioneer, and began writing on this blog in 2003. Before that I had begun a garden website that has been at its own domain since 2006, Ilona's Garden.

I still love writing, gardening, and art after all these years, although travel and grandchildren have become a big part of my life, now.

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Comments

  2. Serena's Secret Gardens says

    Hi Ilona
    Was really interested in your article about the importance of Garden blogging. I think the wonderful thing that blogging enables and magazines cant do is get gardeners far and wide talking to each other. Its one thing to go into a supermarket and buy a magazine which you take home and read yourself, but quite another to jump on the net and read the many comments and articles written by like minded people.Thanks for your comments on my blog it is encouraging!!! cheers

  3. Ilona says

    Garden blogging is just now coming into its own. The conversations are starting up and that makes it really interesting.

    I think Stuart of Blotanical is one of the people to thank for helping to ignite the interest in community – we aren’t just writing our own stories, we are participating in each others experiences more, now. JMO

  4. JWLW says

    Hi llona
    There is no way that magazines can make available the information that is instantly available through blogging. The better magazine publishers are starting blogs and web pages that make past articles available on line. that makes them
    blogger’s just like the rest of us and they are offering information that is not in the publications.

    They are not offering the personal contact that most garden blogs offer. Don’t get me wrong a good magazine article is an excellent source of information and worth the cost.

    John at JWLW

  6. Bren says

    I can’t remember if I left you a comment – because I have been back to this entry a few times in the past two days re-reading it. I LOVE your ideas and research. This is another fabulous entry and I wanted to let you know that I appreciate you sharing this with us.

    Sending you warm wishes from my freezing garden in Ohio!