The question keeps coming back again and again. The last time I publicly thought about it was around 2 years ago. Some of the comment-ers suggested the following two blogs to inspire me to keep writing.
An article on Scientific American and Steve Yegge on why you should blog
Well what prompted me to write it this time is some constructive feedback I received from a regular reader. And mind it, given the number of readers I have, each one counts for a huge percentage. The exact comment he made was "You have trivialized your blog" owing to the presence of many posts that didn't need a lot (or any) thinking at all. Now, there is no way I can say he is wrong, because that's his viewpoint and no logic can prove that wrong, so I won't be trying to do that. What I will however try is to have enough thoughtful posts along with everything else.
While I will do that later, for now, I will try to write why I think I blog. I guess, more than anyone else it is for me to know why I do what I do.
So, here I present my reasons for writing and I am blatantly using content from my chat transcript (perhaps a case of another post that doesn't need a lot of thinking)
I need to balance between what I want and what my readers (I know they are already limited) want but the fact is as much as I write for them, I write for myself no less. So, what I need is probably a middle ground because it's neither a personal diary, nor a newspaper. Actually before I started blogging, I had a diary and recently I read something I wrote 4 years ago and I could relive stuff and realize which parts of my life were more formative than others. Now this chronicling of my life on my blog will also tell me what I had in my mind at certain points. How I changed/evolved (for better/worse). Like last year I was crazy about IPL, so wrote a lot of posts.
I agree blog can't be totally personal, so as I said earlier I need a middle ground. And there are some readers who read these light posts and avoid heavier stuff.
See, I write what I think people will like and something I definitely want to write. Now obviously it won't be palatable to everyone even though I try to make it so. But I won't know until I post it. I don't publish anything knowing that nobody will like it. It's just that I don't get it right in cases when nobody likes it.
So, the transcript ends here.
As a side note, I know of unknown readers (the ones I know now are no longer unknown) also who would never comment, haven't ever met me and I may never about them yet they are there. So, you never know who is reading your blog and what out of it until you actually try which in this case is by posting things whenever you see some value in doing that.
So, as long as I have it in me, I will keep posting for all of you, my known readers, my unknown readers and myself.
An article on Scientific American and Steve Yegge on why you should blog
Well what prompted me to write it this time is some constructive feedback I received from a regular reader. And mind it, given the number of readers I have, each one counts for a huge percentage. The exact comment he made was "You have trivialized your blog" owing to the presence of many posts that didn't need a lot (or any) thinking at all. Now, there is no way I can say he is wrong, because that's his viewpoint and no logic can prove that wrong, so I won't be trying to do that. What I will however try is to have enough thoughtful posts along with everything else.
While I will do that later, for now, I will try to write why I think I blog. I guess, more than anyone else it is for me to know why I do what I do.
So, here I present my reasons for writing and I am blatantly using content from my chat transcript (perhaps a case of another post that doesn't need a lot of thinking)
I need to balance between what I want and what my readers (I know they are already limited) want but the fact is as much as I write for them, I write for myself no less. So, what I need is probably a middle ground because it's neither a personal diary, nor a newspaper. Actually before I started blogging, I had a diary and recently I read something I wrote 4 years ago and I could relive stuff and realize which parts of my life were more formative than others. Now this chronicling of my life on my blog will also tell me what I had in my mind at certain points. How I changed/evolved (for better/worse). Like last year I was crazy about IPL, so wrote a lot of posts.
I agree blog can't be totally personal, so as I said earlier I need a middle ground. And there are some readers who read these light posts and avoid heavier stuff.
See, I write what I think people will like and something I definitely want to write. Now obviously it won't be palatable to everyone even though I try to make it so. But I won't know until I post it. I don't publish anything knowing that nobody will like it. It's just that I don't get it right in cases when nobody likes it.
So, the transcript ends here.
As a side note, I know of unknown readers (the ones I know now are no longer unknown) also who would never comment, haven't ever met me and I may never about them yet they are there. So, you never know who is reading your blog and what out of it until you actually try which in this case is by posting things whenever you see some value in doing that.
So, as long as I have it in me, I will keep posting for all of you, my known readers, my unknown readers and myself.
I got inspired(again)to blog now. I think casual bloggers like us (although you now seem to be more regular) should keep motivating each other :-)
yea, regularity is due to the fact that I relaxed my criteria regarding the content, the backlash of which has already happened :). Anyway, your middle east journey, it seems is giving you enough to write about.