Managing the other blog

As you can see, I've not posted for a while and that's largely in part due to the fact that the other blog takes up a lot of time. Although I was fully aware of the fact that blog posts can take a lot of time to produce, I didn't think it would be the same if I was just writing 2 short paragraphs about a particular artist. It's true to say that the writing doesn't take up that much time but the research takes a long time because I often have to go through quite a few artists, before I can find a suitable one to do a blog post on and it's not unusual for this to take two hours.

In a way the work is very rewarding because it means that I'm discovering lots of good world music, which I'd never heard of before and it means that I learn about the culture of other countries. The blog is also very popular, I so far have 100 followers on Twitter, I've been put on 5 different lists on Twitter and the blog gets quite a few views per day, it's also been recommended by a world music website, so it's nice to know that it provides people with enjoyment. It also gives me something to do when I'm not working in Oxfam, so that I'm not so bored because of the lack of things to do.

Nevertheless I have my doubts as to whether I can keep it going when I get to university because although I like the task, I've not achieved my objective of making money out of it since they only pay you if someone is referred to the website by your blog. I've tried to advertise in the right way by advertising Amazon's mp3 store and trying to sell Amazon's world music of the particular artist featured in my blog but this hasn't led to anyone buying the music. This surprises me given that the blog is quite popular but I half wonder if this is because people illegally download the artist's music or people just listen to the artist's music through YouTube because they can't afford to buy it. Perhaps I'll have to wait for the blog to become more popular, before I can hope to make money out of it. But I don't think I can wait for a very long time to try and make money out of it because law degrees take up 35 hours of your week and I'm thinking of doing a language course aswell, so I'll almost certainly have a lot of things to do without having a daily blog post to do and I will of course want free time. At the moment I'm thinking of updating the blog on a weekly basis, when I get to university, because I think that would be a suitable compromise. Nevertheless, one of my friends at Oxford manages to do lots of extra curricular activities aswell as a physics degree and she managed to get a first in this year's exams. She says this is because she's incredibly organised, so it makes me think that there could be hope for my blog if I'm organised, although that's often not the case!

Another blog

Yesterday I decided to start another blog but that doesn't mean that I'm going to stop updating this one, although naturally I will stop updating it in late September/ early October, when I go to university, and make another blog.

My reason for starting a new blog is that I'm still having no success in finding a job and so currently my only way of making money is to do surveys, so I decided that another way of making money would be to advertise on my blog, and you might ask the question: why don't I just advertise on this one? But I'd rather not advertise on this one because it's more personal, and so I don't want to find myself being unable to publish posts because they make the company I advertise look bad and also because it's personal, I don't get many visitors, so advertisers would be highly unlikely to use this blog to advertise their products.

I thought of many different blogs I could set up, a political blog, a blog of daily photos or a daily blog about music. In the end I decided to do a blog about music because although I take a great interest in politics, I probably won't have so much time to blog about it when I go to university and although I love taking photographs, I just wouldn't have the time to find lots of good things to photograph when I'm doing a law degree but music is an easier thing to blog about because you can find everything you need for the blog on the internet.

I've had a passion for many different sorts of music for a long time, and one of my favourite categories of music is world music, so I've decided to do one about world music, in which I upload one song from the category each day, and therefore decided to call it World Music Daily. So if you like world music, please follow my new blog: http://worldmusicdaily1.blogspot.com/

End of exams

Now that exams are over, I probably won't be posting so much about issues relating specifically to gap years but I'll certainly be telling you about my summer adventures/activities. 

So far I'm not having much success with finding a job, even though my exams are over and I have all the time in the world, in fact there seem to be even less jobs than usual. So at the moment I'm just answering surveys, selling books on Amazon and working two days a week in Oxfam but at the moment I'm not too bothered because I'm not actually that bored. 

I'm currently reading E. M. Forster's novel, A Passage To India and I'm really enjoying it because it gives me a lot of insight into the way in which many Britons acted while India was subject to British colonial rule (obviously I was aware that there was a lot of prejudice towards Indians during this time but I wasn't entirely sure how bad it was) and it helps me to understand why Britons can be treated so unfairly when they go to developing countries.

I've also been rediscovering my love of Klezmer music (Jewish music originating from Eastern Europe) because I lost many songs by the band, Kroke, when my last computer broke down. I started to realise how much I missed them yesterday, so I spent a few hours listening to my favourite songs by the band and found out about more of their songs, which I'd never heard of and it also led me to discover another  Klezmer band called Les Yeux Noirs, admittedly this band isn't as good because they incorporate a range of styles but there are some of their songs which I really like, so I'll share some of their songs with you.

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