My inspiration for blogging comes from my earlier work in Balkans where I saw a huge gap between mainstream media and reality and between high-flown ideas and grassroots. So I started to write e-mails to policy-makers and comments to different forums – the response was modest at highest. Then I started blogging with motto “The other side of story” and got more feed-back.
Today I have some half a dozen blogs. Conflicts by Ari Rusila [aka ex-Balkanblog] covers issues such as conflicts, crisis management and geopolitics and regionally the Balkans, the Black Sea region and MENA (the greater Middle East and North Africa) regions. The content of blog is more in-depth analysis or essays with personal viewpoint of topics mentioned, not daily posts about current events. This main blog has visitors from +180 countries; most of them are from North America, after that from UK, Finland, Serbia, Israel etc.
There is a Finnish version of main blog with a bit different content: Ari Rusilan Konfliktit and also Themes of Ari Rusila which includes some my minicourses for e-learning purpose; this site is still partly under construction. In addition to this a more static website Ari Rusila WebS is available. On Spring 2015 I launched a news portal – Ariel – which gives background info about defence, politics and society of Israel in Finnish language.
Related to blogging101 I now have some specific questions for developing visibility of my blog in blogosphere. Questions such as:
- I have problem to create sitemaps to deliver them via google webmaster tools.
- Tweets made when publicizing post does not show in all site rank analysis,
- I don’t know where in my pages java scripts are located and how to remove them,
- As I have mirror-pages with different platforms and forums so I’m not sure if these make my google ranking lower,
- Loading my site takes too much time.
