The Blogger That Wasn’t

July 25, 2005

Let me be hon­est, I’m not your typ­i­cal, words free flow­ing “out of the box” blog­ger. By that I mean I always find it dif­fi­cult to pull top­ics of inter­est out of that prover­bial hat and most times I just write accord­ing to my gut feel­ing on some­thing that I feel might be impor­tant. How­ever, due to this level of spon­taen­ity, I’m often sec­ond guess­ing myself to the point where most posts (or arti­cles) that I write end up on the cut­ting room floor.

The rea­son for this is that 99.9% of the time I con­vince myself that what­ever I had to say has been said numer­ous amounts of times in one form or another. For exam­ple, the other day I wanted to write about what I called “The Yin and Yang of Pas­tries”, wherein I’d rant about the imme­di­ate glut­tony as a result of Krispy Kremes mak­ing their way into office environments.

After get­ting about halfway into the post I high­lighted the bulk of it and promptly hit the Delete key. Whether I knew it or not at the time I had con­vinced myself that noone in their right mind would be inter­ested in read­ing about how I believe donuts are a lead­ing fac­tor to glut­to­nous office workers.

Along these lines of thought, Keith just wrote about what he’s learned from blog­ging for the past 3 years. To sum­ma­rize; blog­ging takes time, effort and in the scope of things it’s won­der­fully reward­ing. I couldn’t agree more, how­ever, in the past 2 or 3 years since I decided to give this blog­ging thing a try I’ve real­ized that receiv­ing feed­back on posts and build­ing a com­mu­nity of reg­u­lar read­ers is not only reward­ing in the sense that “Hey, peo­ple like read­ing what I have to say”, but also it adds a layer of mean­ing to what would oth­er­wise be equiv­a­lent to hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a brick wall, or writ­ing in a diary that gets shoved into the cor­ner of drawer that’s never opened.

Blog­ging is cer­tainly not a “lock and key”, all eyes diverted kind of activ­ity. In most cases, the blog­ger wishes to share infor­ma­tion with whomever seems inter­ested and the feed­back is what extends the thought, idea, obser­va­tion, tuto­r­ial or les­son into some­thing with more impact and sub­stance that far exceeds anyone’s expectations.

Yet, there’s also a deeper truth here that what lies on the sur­face level. There are those who can keep a con­sis­tent sched­ule of posts and there are those, like me, who post irreg­u­larly. Is there a right or wrong to the amount of posts that should be writ­ten on a monthly, weekly or daily basis? Should an indi­vid­ual write only when some­thing needs to be said, or should a blog be a freeflow­ing medium wherein the blog­ger posts what­ever comes to their head?

At one point I believed that a blog should in its most con­crete form be a con­stantly updated jour­nal, but in recent years other things in my life have taken pri­or­ity. Even then I almost feel that I need to write about some­thing, for fear that whomever keeps my feed around is wait­ing for fresh con­tent. Yet, I don’t want to lock myself down to only pleas­ing my read­ers when in fact this site was started as a per­sonal project to fuel my love for writ­ing and my knack for observ­ing the lighter and darker aspects of life. 

15 comments

Erik you are not alone in won­der­ing about the fre­quency in which you blog or what sub­ject you blog about. I have asked myself these ques­tions on numer­ous occa­sions thus far and I have only been blog­ging for just about a year. I find myself, as you do, sec­ond guess­ing a cur­rent arti­cle and ask­ing “Who would want to read this?” I just have to keep remind­ing myself why I started doing this to begin with.

To sharpen my writ­ing skills and to please myself. Sure I’ve wrote a few fluff arti­cles just to put some­thing fresh up, but over­all I think peo­ple fre­quent and sub­scribe to sites because there is a com­mon inter­est in one thing or another that you have writ­ten. Of course not every­one that reads your site will post a com­ment on every arti­cle but I like know­ing that there is a diverse group of peo­ple that read my site and my var­i­ous non­sense. I for one enjoy the sub­jects you write about and thats why I keep vis­it­ing. If I don’t see any­thing new for a cou­ple of days/weeks thats ok, there is a whole lotta life out there to live and no one should expect some­thing fresh everyday.

by Shawn Grimes on July 25, 2005 at 11:55 am. Reply #

I think on the days you don’t put up fresh con­tent, you should offer a fresh PIZZA to the first per­son who men­tions it.

Like me.

Deep dish, Domi­noes. Pep­per­oni, please.

by Pauly D on July 25, 2005 at 12:18 pm. Reply #

I write two kinds of entries on Binary Bon­sai. One is fast, takes less than 30 min­utes to write and is meant to last no more than a day at most. The other is the exact oppo­site and takes me some­times a week to write. The sec­ond is what I enjoy the most, the first is what usu­ally gets the most traffic.

As for pub­lish­ing sched­ule… I just throw things up when­ever I feel like it. I try not to think too much about it, though after 3–4 days of not post­ing any­thing, I start to get the urge to do some­thing about it again.

As for tar­get­ing an audi­ence, well I just write what I’m inter­ested in, and hope for the best.

Finally, in terms of writ­ing or not writ­ing about things that have already been men­tioned (per­haps bet­ter) else­where: Writ­ing about some­thing, is often more than putting down on ‘paper’ thoughts you are con­scious about. It’s also explor­ing, on your own, dif­fer­ent aspects of it.

Thus: Write about what you feel like, when you feel like it and it will find itself an audience.

PS: Audi­ences are more (but not exclu­sively) about suc­cess­ful PR than content.

And hey, the PIZZA idea is pretty good, I’ll take deep dish with minced meat and extra cheese.

by Michael Heilemann on July 25, 2005 at 12:54 pm. Reply #

Should an indi­vid­ual write only when some­thing needs to be said, or should a blog be a freeflow­ing medium wherein the blog­ger posts what­ever comes to their head?

Well, that’s two extremes. When you’re gonna post only when you “need to say it”, then there’s hardly any pos­i­tiv­ity. That’s bound to hap­pen. You’ll only feel the “need” to post about the bad things.

I like it when you just write when you like to write, because I hardly sub­scribe to blogs that don’t have pas­sion­ate writers.

by Rob Mientjes on July 25, 2005 at 1:11 pm. Reply #

I have had the same prob­lem you described with start­ing a post and then halfway through delet­ing it because I think no one will be inter­ested. But I guess some­times we just have to post it any­way. The good thing is that we can always edit it. :-)

I guess ide­ally it would be good if we could all blog con­sis­tently but there are times when we won’t be able to because of work, fam­ily and other com­mit­ments. Some­times we may just need a break as well.

by Yannick L. on July 25, 2005 at 6:01 pm. Reply #

Werd … and what’s with peo­ple who com­ment on how fre­quently you post?

Per­son­ally, my favorite blogs are ones like this, where when­ever you post it’s actu­ally worth giv­ing it a read. I’d say 80% of the other blogs I sub­scribe to just fill my reader with noise. Fre­quent, empty, postings.

What do you want as a sub­scriber? To have to weed through dozens of posts about noth­ing? Or to have some­thing to read when we do actu­ally post?

I thought the whole point of RSS was that we could tell you when we’ve new con­tent so you don’t have to waste your time check­ing back when there’s no new content?

Infre­quency of post­ings is such a silly thing for peo­ple to com­plain about.

by Adam Michela on July 26, 2005 at 8:30 am. Reply #

Com­pletely unre­lated… Dough­nut Porn.

I watch that when I’m sad.

by Max on July 26, 2005 at 10:00 am. Reply #

I like read­ing posts that come from the heart. When I post top­ics, I speak from the heart. If you get to the point where you don’t know what to post because your tired, you don’t know what to say, your afraid waht you have to say is not impor­tant, etc… the maybe you are experic­ing a lit­tle blog­ging burnout.

I typ­i­cally want to have a min­i­mum of 1 post every cou­ple days at worst.

For my life­hut web­site, I plan on mak­ing it 1 post per day, or 1 every 2 days. JuicedThoughts has been slow, but in fact I have some errors with Mov­able­Type right now, so thats my excuse :)

Majorchampionships.com gets a post every few days. Some­times a week has gone by with noth­ing though.

But speak from the heart. If you feel like writ­ing about how donuts are mak­ing us fat, then write about it. Some read­ers will turn away, some read­ers will be enticed. Heck, you might gain new readers.

I find peo­ple think WAY too much. Just go with the flow and let the blog­ging hap­pen. Too many peo­ple are con­cerned with the qual­ity of their writ­ing think­ing they have an expec­ta­tion to live up to.

Every­one has a style. Of course we want to improve upon that style, but if you start set­ting your per­sonal goals too high or try­ing to meet an expec­ta­tion, your going to fail or get burnt out.

It sounds more like you are at a cross­roads of what you want to do.

Fol­low your heart Erik, thats about the best advice I can give.

by Bryan on July 28, 2005 at 9:00 am. Reply #

Hey Erik

I’ve often found myself think­ing about the same stuff, and it’s some­thing that often has cre­ated con­flict­ing emo­tions. On one hand I want to share every­thing and write all the time, and on the other hand I have to bal­ance my life so I don’t burn out and have to go live on the beach (which sounds mighty nice right now).

My take is that you just gotta do what works for you.

You cer­tainly don’t owe any­one any­thing, and your read­ers sure as hell don’t know what’s going on in your life (unless you tell them), so they’re not really in a posi­tion to say any­thing or complain.

Some days I go through my feeds and all I want to do is com­ment and write about what I think, other days all I want to do is eat choco­late and veg in front of the TV or on the couch with my girl.

What I have found strange is that I’m now start­ing to think “I need to write for my read­ers” which is crap — I need to write for me, and post stuff for me — oth­er­wise there’s no love in it, and that’s a sad, cold, dark place to be in.

My 0.0002 cents amigo ;-)

by oneafrikan on July 29, 2005 at 10:34 am. Reply #

How often have I won­dered as I begin a post, is this post so sim­u­lar to some­one elses that I will be accused of steal­ing mate­r­ial? Try­ing to write humor also presents prob­lems in that, by the time I mull a post around enough in my head that I feel it’s time for pub­lish­ing, it often times no longer seems funny to me any­more. I am also sur­prised that the posts that I feel are sec­ond rate and just cre­ated out of des­per­a­tion, are often more pop­u­lar than ones that I con­sider to be my masterpieces.

by Jon on July 31, 2005 at 11:41 am. Reply #

What­ever you’re doing, keep it up. Your writ­ing is inter­est­ing, and that’s all that mat­ters (for me). The nice thing about RSS is that I’m noti­fied that you’ve got some­thing unique you want to share.

So don’t worry about a keep­ing up a sched­ule. If someone’s vis­it­ing on a daily basis it’s because they’re inter­ested in the comments.

by Bryan Peters on July 31, 2005 at 12:48 pm. Reply #

I’ve been get­ting that same feel­ing for a cou­ple of months now. It’s a phase, you’ll snap out of it :) .

by khaled on August 2, 2005 at 3:33 am. Reply #

I’ve con­tem­plated the same things on occa­sion. I find myself feel­ing forced to stick to a cer­tain style of writ­ing when in real­ity there are a lot of dif­fer­ent styles I’d like to explore, and some­times I find that when I sit down to write an entry I just can’t get the words to sound right on paper. Of course, true inspi­ra­tion comes at the most inop­por­tune times, like when I’m merg­ing onto the freeway.

by Sara White on August 2, 2005 at 6:02 pm. Reply #

Some­times it is hard to find top­ics to write on. I nor­mally just read the news or some blogs to see what’s new, what’s inter­est­ing, or what is weird. Then, I start writ­ing. I’m not the best writer, so I just write what I’m thinking.

About this site over­all, I thought it was cool how you have all those car­toons as the theme of the site. Nice work over­all. If you get a chance, check out my site: http://dragotown.com

by Nick on August 24, 2005 at 10:43 am. Reply #

[…] With Molly say­ing it takes courage, with Erik not too long ago mulling things over and me hav­ing a ten­dency to get a bit emo­tional about it, I began to won­der how blog­ging makes you feel. […]

by Joshuaink: How do you feel about your blog? on September 29, 2005 at 8:42 am. Reply #

Leave your comment

Required.

Required. Not published.

If you have one.