For this week’s edition of Blogging Insights, Dr. Tanya poses her second in a series of questions about what inspires us to blog. She wants to know…

Is the blogosphere a source of writing inspiration for you? How?

Hmm. The “blogosphere,” huh? What exactly is the blogosphere? Well, one definition defines the blogosphere as “the global community of individuals who write and maintain personal blogs on the internet.” Another suggests that it is “all of the blogs or bloggers on the Internet regarded collectively.”

Given those definitions, and especially the first one that refers to the global community of bloggers, the short answer to Dr. Tanya’s question is absolutely yes, the blogosphere is a source of writing inspiration for me.

The most obvious inspiration from the global community of bloggers comes from bloggers who host writing prompts. A writing prompt could be a single word, a short phrase, a question or series of questions, or a picture. The idea is to provide bloggers something to focus on as they compose their posts. The whole point of these writing prompts is to inspire bloggers to respond to them via the blogosphere.

And then there is the engagement a blogger receives by interacting with other bloggers — reading their posts, commenting on them, and responding to comments from other bloggers to their own posts.

Some bloggers claim to write primarily for themselves and don’t need interaction with other bloggers to inspire them to write. But if that’s the case, why don’t they just write using word processing software like Microsoft Word on their laptops or writing apps on their mobile devices instead of posting their writings on their blogs?

Speaking for myself, if it weren’t for my interactions with other blogger, I would probably have quit blogging a long time ago. I wouldn’t have quit writing, mind you. I could simply write whatever I wanted to write but not publish it on a blog. But it’s the feedback and comments and engagement from and with other individuals in that global community of bloggers that inspires me to continue to post my writing into the blogosphere.

Hmm, I seemed to have rambled on a bit in my answer to Dr. Tanya’s question. Maybe I should have just stopped after my short answer that “absolutely yes, the blogosphere is a source of writing inspiration for me.”