I started this blog about thirty days ago, and today I received a wake-up, feedback email from a friend of mine. He told me very politely from how reading my new blog it was clear to him that I had lost my mind, was in need of therapy, how arrogant I am, and who was I trying to impress with all this bullshit I post here anyway? He was very sincere, and honestly trying to help me. I totally got what he said. It made me stop and rethink the whole purpose of this blog, and how it is being received.

What drives me or anyone to write a blog and post about their life and thoughts anyway? Blogging is a new, very popular and totally unnecessary, vain, self-aggrandizing public activity, so yes; I am guilty of showing off and trying to impress you the reader. Funny thing is that I have not even uploaded a fraction of the cool stuff and features I want to really show off! I just have not had the time and skills. And maybe only crazy people blog about themselves, so then I must be crazy.

For me this blog is an experiment. Maybe it is therapy too. I am not sure about that part yet. Just reading blogs is one thing, but I don’t know how to learn more about something than by doing it. I have been to two blogging conferences recently. (I didn’t even write about the first one here to not show off….) I will tell you one thing, the first time you meet a blogger at a conference they ask you, “What is your blog?” And then they never read it.

Are there good and bad reasons to blog? Should sane people not blog about themselves? I have friends that blog about TV shows or PDAs for example. I have plans to do a blog like that too someday. And I have a friend who started a blog last week to document her trip through India. I think that is much better than sending out an email to everyone.

So far in 30 days and two conferences, I have learned maybe 5% of what there is to know about blogging. Here are some of the things I learned.

• It takes a lot of time, and energy to do one–way more than you would imagine by just reading one. Maybe I have not even done mine right.
• A blog is a great tool for communication and sharing information. I have gotten a lot of feedback and discussions based on having this blog that I would not have gotten otherwise.
• There can be downsides and consequences to having a public blog and personal website.

Send me your feedback how this blog can be improved, changed, etc.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.