Why I Blog

There is an excellent article in the Atlantic Monthly by Andrew Sullivan titled “Why I Blog.” I highlighted a few of the points :

• Blogging rewards brevity… it’s a broadcast, not a publication.

• We bloggers have scant opportunity to collect our thoughts, to wait until events have settled and a clear pattern emerges.
• A blog is not so much daily writing as hourly writing. And with that level of timeliness, the provisionality of every word is even more pressing – and the risk of error or the thrill of prescience that much greater.
• Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
• It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before.

The bullet points are just the pieces I identify with as a blogger -- a real blogger, once a upon a time, four years ago to be exact. We did daily blogging for a year and it was time consuming, fun, intoxicating, and creative. We have kept it up in bursts, which works for us, but not so much for regular readers. I hope to start again, but it depends on how much time the day job requires. I doubt I or we will reach our halcyon days of that first year, but that is okay and to some extent preferable. I found myself writing to an audience or for a reaction rather than writing for me.