Monday, February 06, 2006

 

Blogs, for me: An Internal Dialogue

Me? Not a huge fan of blogs, actually. Huge fan of the medium. I read blogs constantly. But not any one blog in particular. I like boingboing.net I like kottke, adaptive path's essays, for work stuff. I like some friends' blogs, like joe's, matt's and al's. But I'm really not a hugely dedicated to any particular blogs. I'm more likely to find a good post from technorati or google's blog search, than from some blog I subscribe to. In fact, the new google desktop is marvelous for me serendipitously finding blogs whose overall content and backlogs I don't necessarily want to read. Instead I stumble upon some current insight that's in-line with my fleeting interests. Individual blogs? They rarely inspire me so often that I would return to them with regularity. Zeldman. I liked Zeldman when he was more prolific. I like Cory Doctorow. I like Xeni Jardin. I wish Kurt Vonnegut had a blog. Or my dad.

That said, my expectations for my own blogs are basic. Our biz blog at Red Door does not get regular readership, but it does get tons of irregular readership. On the one hand, not a huge number of repeat visits. On the other, lots of little one-time interest. This shotgun approach has its its business purpose. But my personal blog, I don't have any expectations from my readers there at all; it's just a medium for getting my thouhgs on paper and for nodding toward news and blogs I agree with. Nevertheless, one of the pleasant surprises of blogging has been people googling me and getting in touch with the inevitable "how the hell are you, it's been too long" email. While my blog is good at telling people how to find me, it's pretty lousy at telling them what I've been up to outside of my mental world of words and thoughts. Nor is is it fulfilling any burning desire I have to write either. Dern near all of my "real" writing is done in private to be published in magazines.

So again, what should a blog -- for a guy like me, who likes the medium, gets it, and loves it, who likes to write, and lives his life almost entirely online -- hope to accomplish? At the end of the day, twenty years from now, what really should my blog communicate?

¶ 2/06/2006 10:29:00 AM

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