Why bother blogging?

A Family article with View Comments posted 1 December 2008.
Tags: analytics, blog, motivation, old media, publishing

Sometimes I really wonder why I bother. I’m not getting all depressive and “woe is me” about it, but I find that I often hang too many hopes on how successful my website is. I have a few dozen regular readers, about a thousand visitors a month (who are mostly interested in technical information I publish), and that’s the extent of it. Then I happened across a old-ish article by Seth Finkelstein arguing that blogs don’t really get around old media, they just reinforce a different hierarchy of contributors.

I also found an article written in 2006 on Rough Type which argues quite pointedly that the “blogosphere,” as such, is really just a new feudal structure for information distribution. If you’re looking to get around “old media,” a blog isn’t what you’re looking for.

And yet. And yet I never started writing on this site because I wanted to get around “old media” – though to be honest, I wouldn’t mind if my political ideas got some more traction. I really started writing here to distributed ideas. A lot of those technical posts have been quite successful. Yet at the same time, a post I wrote about prosthetic dog testicles continues to be one of my most popular writings. Not the series I’ve been working on about the ethics of Freedom Software in the church, not my pictures of family and friends, plastic dog balls. Fulfilling, indeed.

I’m not planning on stopping writing – in fact, I often find myself planning to write here more. My Blogfodder file is longer than ever. But, for my own sake, I need to say – indeed, I need it to be true – that I’m writing to share ideas with the world, find solutions to computer-y problems, to present my hobbies and what’s going on in my life to family and friends. Few people are interested in regularly subscribing to a blog that is about such a personal and eclectic mix of stuff. Few still are interested in my peculiar mixture of hobbies, politics, and religion. I’m not interested in splitting the site, starting new ones, or anything else like that right now. And… (deep breath)… I’m okay with that!

Now I just need to find a 12-step program for addiction to Google Analytics…