Thoughts About Blogging

While I was thinking about what to do with my blog – whether to continue writing here in Rod’s Floating World or to move over to a new blog, or perhaps to open multiple blogs so they could be subject specific, I realized I had never really contemplated what I wanted to accomplish with a blog. The short answer is – I don’t really know the answer to that question. What motivates me to write and to publish those writings online?

I am really not interested in a commercially successfully blog. I’ve read quite a few of them (and subscribe to a couple) and though they’re enjoyable they lack the “personality” that I like. When I read someone else’s blog I like to get the sensation that I am reading what a person is writing. Not an assumed virtual persona whether the handle is anonymous or masked or not. I think one of the great powers of the internet is the ability of people to connect with other people. There is plenty of commercially produced content online and I really don’t feel a great need to contribute to that sea of stuff. So, whatever I decide to do, ultimately, it is going to be a personal blog – I am going to try and keep that personal touch that lets you understand that you are reading something that is writing by someone. Not something that is produced according to some magic formula for the sole intention of selling ad space.

Then, I do like a theme. There is nothing particularly wrong with the rambling blogs, but a themed blog is simply easier to follow. A theme is more of an assurance that when the reader goes to a specific site they are going to get articles that move along certain vectors, articles that are about certain things – poetry, short fiction, writing, science, technology, media, - whatever the author chooses to write about., but it allows the reader to find those blogs of interest and follow them, with a sort of implicit promise that if your interest is poetry, you’re not going to log on and find a political rant – or vice versa.

I also write as an internal process. I write to help me understand – well, me. So, to a degree, I write as an act of contemplation and meditation. Call it mediation at the keyboard. I write in an attempt to understand things.

Then, I write to create, writing to create, I write to hone my writing and my story telling skills. Here is an interesting little tidbit – I write a lot for work – I write training manuals, I write technical documentation, I write process documentation, I write informational documents, I write analytical documents and I write persuasive documents – in short, I write a lot. I write a little over 200,000 words a year. That is roughly the equivalent of writing two novels a year. I’d also hazard that, as in information systems analysis manager I make an income that exceeds most writers, probably by a significant margin. Just out of curiosity I used Google to see what payscale.com lists as the average income for a retail book author: 28K to 59K. Compare that to the average income for an IT manager: 59K to 101K. Hmmm, I think I may very well continue to write for the love of it.

So, I am going to write something personal, I am going to write something themed, I am going to write to hone my writing and story-telling skills and I am going to write for the love of it. It doesn’t really answer my question on whether I should have multiple blogs (though it does point toward an answer), but it does provide me with insight. The biggest insight I drew from this little writing exercise is simply this – I write for the love of it. That is a pretty amazing thing. But then, love always is.

(Okay, just a bit of strangeness involving this post - I originally wrote it while winding down the afternoon at work and attempted to use the email feature to submit it to the blog - but the security policy at work caught the email and rejected it for content. I've tried re-reading it, but I can't see what content it would reject, other then perhaps some strange combination of words. Very unusual.)