Why I'll never be a big-time blogger

[dtm]

I have come to the reluctant conclusion that I'll never be a big-time blogger. Sure, I might have the very, very occasional post linked to by someone else, but I can pretty much guarantee that the only people reading my livejournal regularly will be people who actually know me outside of the world of blogging.

I'm sure this comes as a shock to no one who actually has been looking at my livejournal - after all, I seem to be going for about a post a week, and that hardly makes for interesting reading, especially when I only seem to post gripes about how life sucks in one way or another and, let's face it, my life is actually pretty good. My point is that no one is likely to care, and I don't blame them. If I weren't me, I wouldn't care much about my life either.

The thing is, it seems so deceptively easy to become a big- (or at least moderate-) time blogger. Sure, some people start out with the advantage of huge name recognition (at least among geeks), and surely that helps them build an audience, but then there's people like Mark Pilgrim whom I know mainly as that jerk my wife knew in High School. (Ok, so Mark gets a push from having written a python introduction that many people like. Still.) And then, if we get less big time than that, there's people like my friend Garrett or the guy behind healyourchurchwebsite.com. Not as "big time" in the blogosphere, but I read them.

When I look at some other blogs, it's tempting to think, "I could do that." Sure, Eugene Volokh is a law professor, and so has some degree of academic acheivement in the area that he blogs about, but other members of his little conspiracy seem to have little in common as far as credentials go except a common political slant. I don't happen to share their political slant, but I do have a political slant. I think.

I remember when I first discovered slashdot back in early 1998. I thought "I could do that." After all, it's just a bunch of spaghetti perl backed up to a simple database; that's not hard. The editors don't even seem to have to do any editing. Except, of course, that I didn't do that. In fact, I never even registered a single domain name for myself (Other people have already registered the obvious domains based on my name). I don't keep my static web pages (which are still scattered in across at least two different hosts) even remotely up to date.

Just one more example, I promise, and then I'll try to get back to the point.

There was a guy a year behind me in college who (as a freshman) thought he was just the cat's meow of programmers. Although I was not really among those who put him in his place, I must admit that I enjoyed watching it happen. Most people can now probably figure out where this is going. These days, we share a webhost run by someone we both knew in college, and so I can see his access statistics. On my birthday last year, he got over 11,000 hits. Okay, it's not slashdot, but it's not my piddly little three-hits-per-week personal site either. (It's all thanks to this stupid little gnome-bashing windows game that he wrote)

So, Tom, I could still kick your ass at most any regulated, announced programming competition you care to name, but it doesn't matter. You've done something, and I haven't.

Anyway, I see all these people I know, and I see how they're producing something on the web of value, or at least interest to the outside world; at the very least, I see what's popular and think "that's not hard - I could do that." I can do expository technical writing (random strangers have even told me I do that well), and I certainly produce better documentation (on average, and when I do it at all) than most of my coworkers. (Even the native English speakers) I can code perl or java or C (I could even decipher intercal at one point in time, though I have yet to convince myself of a need to decipher false or brainf_ck) with, well, maybe not the best of them, but certainly with the very good of them. There's nothing stopping me from putting up a completely buzzword-compliant site with all the content smoothly generated via axkit or some other hip technology.

And yet, I haven't actually done that. The most common google search leading to my webpages is for the ant manual in PDF, which I put together one weekend for ant 1.4 and haven't bothered to redo for any future version. So the content isn't even mine.

So this is why I'll never become a big-time blogger or have an even modestly popular website: I'll never keep it up. If I did go out, get my own domain name, install moveable type (or write my own blogging system), and start commenting on world events, or tech. matters, or theology, or whatever, I'd stop within a month. Actually, probably sooner. I can't see myself with the attention span necessary to keep it going for more than two weeks.

Not having a linked-to blog or website wouldn't bother me so much if it didn't seem so deceptively easy. Nor would it bother me if I could point to a list of completed electronics projects, or a carefully landscaped yard, or a book, or something else tangible and say "I just don't have the time - see what I spend all my time on." Instead, our yard barely gets mowed during the mowing season, this post comes close to being the longest thing I've written outside of work in years and years, and the electronics project which I've been supposedly working on for three years hasn't gotten beyond the stage of parts organized in plastic boxes. (which I keep meaning to at least label, but somehow I never get around to it)

It's a good thing I live in the year I do. I might have been able to make a tolerable hunter/gatherer, but surely would have starved as a farmer.

Comments

I can't even work in good quotes

[dtm]

I kept trying to come up with a place to work in the quote "the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to him that endureth", but it never seemed to fit anywhere.

Besides, it's not actually the biblical quote it may sound like; it's an amalgam of Ecclesiastes 9:11 [I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.] and possibly Matthew 10:22 [And ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved.].

There is a very similar quote [Because the race is not to the swift nor the battle always to the strong, but to him that endures faithful to the end.] in some of Joseph Smith's writings, but the "always" weakens it considerably, and I have issues with even those Mormon writings I might otherwise agree with.

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

I'd say that it's reasonably clear that you don't want to be a big-time blogger. I can't see being a big-time blogger as a goal for myself, either, to be perfectly honest. I mean, yes, it's nice to think that one might be 'important' enough for other people to bother reading, but at the end of the day, blogging doesn't get the lawn mowed.

[tahlulu.livejournal.com]

I just surfed into your blog and read this ... was this your farewell message? ... or is this your *spring break* message? :)
---Tahlulu