What I am up to.
At Silt 3.0, a Web log written by an American in Amsterdam, I encountered a variant of the button above, which I encourage all bloggers to press. The link is to an interestingly complex survey about the relation between blogging and more venerable forms of human interaction.
Eight months into proper blogging, I feel more committed to writing for this site than I have ever felt about anything, even paying jobs. I know that blogging has been around for a while, but from the perspective of someone close to sixty, it doesn't make much difference whether I discovered blogging in 2004 or 2002. Almost immediately, I saw that it was the answer to a question that I hadn't known how to ask. I've only just begun to feel that my little vessel is sailing a smooth course; I no longer begin the day wondering what I'm going to do next.
And I've gotten used to the quiet atmosphere, which is sometimes, dishearteningly, quite SETI-like. I'd prefer to have a bit more traffic, and I don't think that I'll ever garner too many comments, but I'm learning not to count. I'm discovering that quality and quantity are on many levels inversely related. Sunday's entry alone elicited three well thought-out comments, one of them an entry manqué for his own blog by Joe Jervis of Joe.My.God. Très cool, in my not-very-humble opinion. Mine is not a blog for jumping in and out of, and I assume that there are few ADD-sufferers among my readers. Nor does this blog have what you might call an area of concentration. I am always reminded of my friend Rob, who said one night at dinner that the Daily Blague is a forum for my "philosophy," a remark that stunned me at the time but that may really be quite accurate. The site is that general.
I have yet to encounter a blog that reminds me of mine. That's disappointing, because I don't have anyone to measure up against. This isn't to say that there aren't a lot thoughtful, well-written blogs out there. But the primacy of blogging in the hierarchy of things that I do makes for a difference. The only other blogger who doesn't have a day job (that I'm aware of) is Jason Kottke, and I write a great deal more about a broader range of things than Mr Kottke does. (This is not to say that I keep a better blog.) I am also not a computer engineer, and have nothing to say about the technology of blogging. My command of that technology is very limited, and it was painfully acquired. The last thing I want to write about is how I'm dealing with, say, comment spam. This - what you're reading - is how I talk about blogging.
One of the MIT survey questions asked how long I'm planning to maintain and update my blog. The response options ranged from "I have already stopped it." to "5 years or more." I chose the latter and moved on, wondering however if it isn't a bit lazy to assume that blogging will still be what I want to do in 2010. I don't assume that I'll still be around in five years (I do hope to be), but I'm pretty certain that blogging, or its assigns and successors, will be occupying the foreground of my life if I am.
(What a crushing thought: five years of this torrential verbiage!)
