6 April 2010
What is the point of a blog?
Lately I have been contemplating a lot of things in life. One such thing revolves around what I want to do when I grow up…if I grow up. For several years, I have been convincing myself that I would not be working in a traditional job for the rest of my working life. At some point, I decided that I would transition into something more independent. I hadn’t quite decided if I’d be exclusively in real estate, open my own store, establish a new service-based business, or possibly run some sort of online business. Maybe I would get lucky and my blog would begin to attract enough readers that I could branch out into money-making opportunities such as courting advertisers. This got me thinking about what exactly is the point of having a blog at this point in my life?
Why people start a blog?
Sometimes you have a thought that you want to share with others, but it’s not important enough that you want to call up all of your friends and let them know about it. If it’s not important enough to share in person, is it valuable enough that people want to read about it on your blog?
Sometimes you want to communicate with a large audience at once and don’t have time to distribute this information person-to-person. Obviously your interaction with those others has been cheapened when doing this. Wouldn’t it be better to share this important information face-to-face with those that you know will value the information?
Some people just feel like they have to get things off of their minds. Back in the day, this was accomplished through a journal. If you were really good, maybe someone would read your journal after you died and publish some of your writings. With today’s instant fame potential, it seems that some people write just hoping that they’ll be discovered and become an overnight sensation.
I think that some actually want to pass on useful information to whoever might be listening. These are the people who share knowledge without any expectation of payback or fame. A friendly comment now and then would be appreciated, but they’re not looking for anything else.
And then there are those who spit out multiple posts weekly in an attempt to attract subscribers and thus increase their value to advertisers. The blog has become their career. In the past, I have subscribed to many of these, but I am beginning to lose my patience with them. I recently removed nineteen blogs from my RSS reader in an attempt to simplify my life in one small way.
Why do I blog?
That’s a very good question, and I’m glad you asked. I think it’s a little bit of everything that you see above. I want to share information that is interesting to me, but I’m not sure if anyone else is interested. I want anyone who has an interest to be able to read it, but I don’t want to approach them with this information. There are days when I just have thoughts that I want to put “out there”, but I don’t know where else to put it, but the internet. Occasionally I want to share a handy tip that I’m proud to have thought of. And then there are days when I think that maybe I should put more effort into blogging and start spitting out cookie-cutter self-help posts and make some dollars in the process. I have no doubt that I could attract subscribers and make money doing this, but I have a feeling that I might hate it.
Where does this leave me? Not sure. My guess is that you’ll continue to see posts from me at random increments of time that ramble about any miscellaneous topic that’s on my mind. To me, it’s therapeutic, but I don’t get a huge benefit from it and I’m postulating that you don’t either. For now, it seems that this is the nature of the open internet. Maybe some day, the common person will find a truly valuable use for the publishing capabilities of the internet. Right now, I will estimate that .001% of us already have.
Unrelated Tidbit: Have you ever seen a double-pendulum? It’s wacky. Just search on youtube.
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