The unlikely blogger

I have now been blogging about sustainability for over two years.

I am the most unlikely blogger. I am not on Twitter or Facebook. I do not have a smart phone - in fact, the number for the mobile phone I do have is kept well protected and hardly anyone contacts me that way. I had been blogging for over a year before I told more than ten people about the blog, and allowed Tyson to post links to it on his Facebook page. Readership shot up from two to ... oh, twenty?

More recently it occurred to me that writing this blog is in itself an act towards sustainable living - but not really if no-one knows its here. So in January I decided to enter my blog in the ReNew Magazine's 'blog of the year' competition and to my enormouse surprise, I came second! I have received a lovely solar lantern and woodgas camp stove from Stickman Stoves (thank you!) but perhaps more importantly ReNew magazine ran an article about the blog, so perhaps a few people out there who don't know me personally may now have had a look at it.

Initial Time: I picked at writing the first eleven posts over several weeks - Eva was about 4 months old at the time and 'picking at' was all I could muster. This is why all the early (Jan 2010) blogs are posted on the same day - I launched them when I was happy with the group and confident I may be able to continue writing relatively regularly.

Initial Cost: Zero.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Zero cost. Time: 2-4 hours per month, depending on the complexity of the blog entry, research required, calculations, and number of photographs.

Impact: My hope is that at very least I have inspired a few people to have a go at simple actions for more sustainable living - that I am showing that it is do-able.

This is where I need your input. In a raging break with my quiet style I am asking for comments (!!!) to answer this section. Has this blog had any impact on you at all? Is there anything, however small, that you have been inspired to try after reading this blog? Please leave comments even if you stumble across this entry in 6 months time - or come back and leave comments here in future if you get around to making changes later on. Thanks!

The second thing you can do to change the impact that this blog has is to let other people know that its here. I'm a shocker at self-promotion. If anyone out there thinks the content of this blog is worth sharing, and might help make a difference towards us living better together on our one small planet, please let some of your friends know.

The third thing you can do is consider how YOU let others know what YOU are doing to live more sustainably. I think more is going on quietly than is publicly acknowledged, and it would help change our cultural attitidues towards sustainable living if more of us went public - even just to our close friends and family - with our convictions and actions for a better world.

That's an awful lot of interactive options for me in one go. I may have to go lie down for a while to recover...