Why I continue blogging altho' I average 150 hits a day

i rarely turn to navel-gazing, at least on the subject of blogging, but this post on the executioners thong prompted me to respond...

Ah but that is the great empty promise of blogging: You can say anything you want and imagine it is visible to the 100 million connected browsers the minute you hit "Publish Post". You lay out your cool idea, your expose' of local corruption or your insightful essay but nobody comes round to read it. It is up to you to do some of the work for the present crop of blog search facilities: you have to decide a category and and audience that best fit your writing. You have to find the blogroll, the blog alliance or the blog carnival where the traffic is more likely to come looking for your particular color and flavor of blogging. In short, if you want readers, you have to be of some recognized kind and bear the tags of that kind or plug your blog into an appropriate syndicate. To be sui generis, no matter how compelling, amusing and excellent your work, is to court obscurity.

[...]

Why one starts a blog is not necessarily why one continues it. Long running blogs are part of your identity, even when you blog under a pseudonym. It is of course a projection of some aspect of yourself to take on some voice and reflect on the world or report something in your life. This seems to be the dubious bedrock on which much non-professional blogging rests: "hey! Look at me". It is a need to be or at least imagine that you have been seen/heard/known/understood. As motive, that can always be put down but never put away. It abides. I took an enforced rest in August and September and found that I felt diminished both in confidence, capacity to write and sense of connection to the small audience I imagine I have. If one is not paid to blog and one is not seduced by and addicted to the hit counter, motive is not so clear.

i turned to blogging for a very simple reason... i desperately needed an outlet for the horror that has built inside me for the nearly 6 years of the reign of the criminal gang in washington... yes, initially, i sought traffic and was pleased to get any at all... i began to see how i could "tweak" my posts with highly-charged keywords and flirted for a while with the blog traffic exchange services... what's it's boiled down to for me, however, in the 20 months that i've been at it, is that, traffic notwithstanding, i have a deep need to stick with what i know is my own authentic voice... if someone else finds something worthwhile in that voice, well and good... i will continue putting out the pieces of what i believe suggest the larger pattern of what's happening, pieces that i believe tell a deeper story, and trust that any small impact that effort has is worthwhile... perhaps, more importantly, it helps me retain a grip on my own sanity as, hypnotized, i continue to watch the snake charmer play the cobra up out of the basket...

with all that said, i cannot shake the feeling deep in my gut that we are headed to some unforeseen, dramatic, and world-changing climax... there is just too much in play, and, if i've learned anything from my, admittedly, less-than-sophisticated studies of chaos and complexity theory, it's that everything is connected to everything else and that the "law of unintended consequences" rules...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet