On blogging

Since I am going to start this blog, and since I don't currently have an agenda for it, I thought I'd explore some ideas about why I might be doing it. I've always considered blogs to be an egocentric activity. Some might say that it is part of improving the democratic process, or giving a voice to the people, or moving the vox populi away from the commercial media to a more distributed, less controlled form of communication, but I see it as simply massaging your own self-importance.

Who is it that want's to read what I want to say?

But if that were true then blogging would not have become the phenomenon that it is today. Looking around, everyone has blogs, and more amazingly, other people actually read them. A quick survey of the most successful blogs indicate that they contain at least one of the following key factors:

• They are by people in the public eye
• They are focussed and contain the opinions of experts
• They are by people who are in situations that are different to the average blog reader (eg. they are a taxi driver explaining his daily live, a homeless person, etc.)

On top of this, they have to be fairly personal, forthcoming and honest. They can't just be a random person writing about random things s/he likes and dislikes. So to be honest, I think this particular blog is doomed to failure already.