Blog and the World Blogs With You, Cry and You Cry Alone

Áine on May 20th, 2005 filed in General

I was just cruising through my bloglines blogs, reading a few things here and there and stumbled across a posting by Joi Ito (dated 21 May), which I’m not going to link to because I already commented over there and I don’t want to send a trackback too (stupid auto-discovery!). Anyway, he worries that his blog is becoming boring and he thinks it’s because he worries about what to blog about and what the critics will say about it (as they already have) and that it seems to be having a sort of chilling effect on his blogging.

In some ways, I can see how that could happen. I think it’d be more common among A-List bloggers than the rest of us,… though maybe not. At times I feel like I have to blog -something- just so there isn’t many days of silence here and I lose my whole 6 readers (or however many are reading. See? I don’t even know! LOL)… but yanno, some days, I just don’t have time to blog, or I can’t think of anything I want to write about, or I’m all written out from writing on other sites (and yes, I do write in several other places online).

I should hope that, on those days, people would peruse the archives if I haven’t written in a couple of days (I recommend the Essays category, btw), because what’s here on the front page is probably not a good way to make a judgment about the whole of this blog. The front page is a small segment of what’s here. It’s easy to think this is all there is, I suppose, and if you don’t like it, you move on… but in some ways, I think that’s pretty shallow. It’s kind of like not talking to someone based on how you think they look, or judging a book by its cover.

But anyway, the advice I gave Joi applies equally to this blog (and the other blogs I write in). I’m going to write about what I want, when I want. I’m not trying to be Ernest Hemingway or Virginia Woolf or anyone else. I don’t have any illusions that I’m some great American author and I refuse to conform to anyone’s expectations but my own. If you don’t like that, too bad. It’s my blog, and my writing. Nobody said you had to read it or like it, right?

2 Responses to “Blog and the World Blogs With You, Cry and You Cry Alone”

aldahlia.net Says:
May 20th, 2005 at 11:53 pm
One of your 6 regulars checking in.

It’s no use to worry about a blog being boring, as in the grand scheme, most folks you pass on the street don’t care about blogging *at all.*
Aine Says:
May 21st, 2005 at 12:18 am
True. Matter of fact, if the statistics are right, 2/3 of people who actually use the internet still don’t have a clue about blogs… but they’re beginning to figure it out.

I’m at the point where I can’t stand building static hard-coded HTML pages anymore because they’re just such a hassle to update or make additions to. I look for any excuse to use a blogging application (and yes, you can make a blog NOT look like a blog if you know what you’re doing). It’s just so much easier to manage content with an application than without one that I don’t want to go back to doing things the old way anymore.

But anyway… I don’t worry too much about my blog being boring (although I do worry sometimes that I don’t have anything to say… writer’s block is a beeyotch, yanno). I’d hope that people would understand that there are times when I’m going to just be quiet and not write for a little while, but also know that I haven’t abandoned the blog.