Blog much?

How often should a person put up posts on their blogs? It obviously depends on the person. What's fascinating for me is how much you can understand about a person (and how much I understand about myself) based on the way they blog.

I started this blog as a place to let me write, to really sit down and think through an idea and develop it in ways that I can't do on my job. The result is that I don't end up blogging that much, on the grounds that I don't want to fill this space with idle chatter. But an overly silent blog runs the risk of feeling like a house unlived in, a place that people forget about because there aren't any reasons to go there. My answer to this conundrum a contemplative post like this one, something of a blog about blogging.

When the web was first exploding in the late 90s I was desperate to put up a site, but was constantly confronted by the same dilemma -- what do I really want to say to the world? Developing a career in journalism was  in part an answer to this question. Journalists by profession are given specific subjects to write about, and don't generally find themselves questioned about their legitimacy to be writing on that subject. But this only in part solved my writing problem, as this blog evidently demonstrates.


It's the same problem I find myself having with Twitter, which despite my initial eyeball rolling have come to respect as serious tool to do all sorts of things including really good journalism. But from what I can tell, it really functions for you once you start throwing tweets out into the world, which isn't natural for me. It's the same reason that I want to sit down and really think about blog entries and ultimately feel like the post is reaching a conclusion and saying something coherent. My original post on this blog conjured up the idea of a version of a Twitter based on 400-word well-written and punchy posts on subjects of profound relevance. It's easy to see why micro-blogging will always trump my medium-sized blogging idea.

Trying to reserve this space for Writing with a capital W leaves out a lot of worthwhile things that could be said. It's possibly my biggest flaw as a writer -- not wanting to write things on concern that they aren't worth being published. I've been consistently surprised at how just about any post I put up -- even the ones I considered sending to the recycle bin instead of publishing -- almost always get at least a few readers. It's comforting to me that people still want to read some dude's blog even in today's overwhelming landslide of digital noise. I always turned up my nose at blogs filled with pedestrian details of a person's lunch meeting or shopping dates because they struck me about as interesting as a Twitter feed filled with "I'm eating soup" or "I'm drinking coffee" tweets.

Turns out people read both. Which is hard for me to believe, but an obvious sign of why blogging is self discovery.