Making Blogging Work

I wrote this post once and everything just disappeared. It isn't Blogger's fault, some single key on this broken keyboard (I am in someone else's office) deleted everything on my screen, how annoying.

Anyway, I was writing about the depressing lack of writing that appears to be coming from everyone's blogs. When I am at work at night (I am working overnights all summer this year until mid-October) I sometimes run through everyone's blogs to see if anyone has made an attempt at writing anything. It is very sad that so many people have so many idle blogs everywhere. I can't believe how many people got into blogging this spring and early this summer but have decided not to continue. I have a number of links from this blog to other people's blogs and not a single one of them has managed to make it through the summer still blogging (except for other blogs that belong to me which mostly all have regular content going onto them.)

I was very excited by the tremendous effort that Tony was putting in with two blogs and a podcast on the way. But the second blog ended up just replacing the first one and the podcast seems to have killed the entire thing.

Blogging, apparently, is a difficult undertaking. Personally, I find it one of the most useful, valuable and simple forms of written, personal, recorded communication. Maybe I find it easier because I have been writing my blog(s) for so long that the process has become second nature to me. Maybe I just got started early enough (mid-2000!!) that there was no hype involved to get me excited so the fact that I was writing an online journal had to be cool for the sake of being an online journal and not because I could be a part of the greater blogosphere.

It is too bad. I really enjoy reading the blogs of people that I know. I especially like just simple, personal blogs letting me know what people are up to, what they are doing and what has been changing in their lives. It is so hard to keep up with people these days. It is nice to have a system for keeping track. I especially would like it if more people would podcast. Blogs are great and I spend most of my time in print journalling. But it is hard to find time, for most of us, to sit down with a blog and to read it all. We tend to look for articles that interest us and to only read those. And that is fine. But I want to keep up with people. I find that podcasts are the best way to do that because I can almost always find plenty of time to listen to things while I am busy doing other things (driving, walking, cleaning, etc.)