Some of you may have noticed via my del.icio.us links that my Dad apparently didn’t get the memo that blogging isn’t “mainstream,” and is just a medium for the technically inclined. That’s right: the man who’s spent a lifetime on Wall Street is blogging. His effort, which I’m enjoying quite a bit, is here.
Here’s what happened: while home visiting my parents over Thanksgiving, I encouraged them to consider blogging. This recommendation was the outgrowth of a conversation I’ve had with friends of mine who, like me, are beginning to realize that their parents have lived interesting lives. Very interesting, in some cases. It can be tough to remember, at times, because families have all heard each others stories, several thousand times. But to outsiders, these stories can be remarkably entertaining.
My Mother being as intrinsically and fundamentally humble as my Dad, immediately contended that their lives were nothing remarkable and certain to be of little interest to anyone else. I dissented, citing the example of Angela’s Ashes. Not that their story compares to that of the McCourt family, or that they have the gift of language that he does, but rather in the sense that what’s mundane to one audience can be compelling to another.
A day or two later, my Dad asked me how difficult it would be for him to set up a blog. Takes about 45 seconds, I replied. Really? Must be pretty difficult to use then, he said. No more so than your Yahoo Mail, I came back. A couple of minutes later, SOG’s ETF Report was born into the vibrant world of WordPress.com blogs.
Frankly, I didn’t really know what to expect. The ETF in the title stands for Exchange Traded Funds, and the ostensible purpose for the blog is ultimately to replace a nightly email summary of the ETF activity on the exchange where he works. Unlike my financially oriented brother who was visiting here in Denver yesterday evening, I don’t know the first thing about ETF’s so I wasn’t sure the blog would be all that relevant to me.
Shortly after starting the blog, however, Dad started to spice it up with material from his life – just as we had discussed. While I am no more able to judge the potential interest in his pieces than my own content (Baus’ law, remember), I’m enjoying his comments on the Chinese walls within the O’Grady Household, his recaps of Exchange practical joke techniques (the second one is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, period), tales of North Korean brothels (you need to tell the one about the guy trapped in the outhouse, Dad), and description of the perils of “night soil” and ambushes during midnight sweeps of the DMZ. And for those of you that are financially inclined, there’s a ton of on the ground ETF intelligence for you.
I have no idea how long this will hold his interest, or if he’ll ever be able to accomplish his goal of replacing some of his email burden with this blog. But in the interim, I’m very pleased that he’s documenting some of the stories that have made his life interesting, so that they can be shared with others. I’ve seen the benefits of scaling aspects of my personality to the web, and I’m hopeful he will too. It seems as if he will, given that he’s been blogging for two weeks and already has people del.icio.us’ing his work.
One additional note of interest to readers who might not feel they have the ability to blog: my Dad is not the writer in the family, Mom is. An English Major with a Masters and publications in the Joyce Quarterly (never ask her about Ulysses if you don’t have an hour or so to kill) to her credit, I thought that if my either of them would embrace blogging it would be her. As a bit of RedMonk trivia, my Mom served as RedMonk’s copy editor for the first couple of years when our primary outlet was PDF publications rather than blogs. Mom writes better than the rest of us put together (she also does the Sunday Times crossword puzzle faster than just about everyone else in the country, but that’s another post).
The moral being: if you think you can’t blog, consider at least giving it a shot. You don’t have to be Joyce, you just need a human voice (apologies for the egregious rhyme).
