I’ve read quite a few blogs during the last year or so and not surprisingly they haven’t all been good. I think that is the main reason it took me so long before I started writing my own blog. I’ve been part of a small blogging community called Interesting Stuff since August last year (it’s in Danish in case you were thinking of following the link) and when I found out how easy it was to create a blog I immediately started thinking about creating my own. But I kept putting it off, because I was convinced that my life was so incredibly boring that I couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to read about it. But I kept thinking about it and reading more and more blogs and I got really fascinated by the fact that I’d go back every day to check up on the doings of complete strangers.

But I realized that I didn’t think about writing a blog in a very focused way until I read an essay called Why Web Journals Suck by Diane Patterson. In the essay she lists a lot of reasons why most people shouldn’t be writing blogs and she gives a lot of helpful advice to people, who decide to do so anyway. The main thing the essay made me think about was why I wanted to write a blog in the first place. And the conclusion was that I wanted to write again. I didn’t want to write a diary and I don’t feel the need to reveal my dark secrets to strangers. I want to write about things I’m interested in and fascinated by with the hope that others might read what I’ve written and perhaps discovery something they didn’t know about. I’ve written a lot of articles in the past on music and movies and I really get a kick out of it. As tough as it can be to meet a deadline for a review of an album that you can’t stand listening to twice I always felt like I’d done my best, when I sent it to my editor and no matter what I’d written about I felt like I’d worked hard to put something interesting out there.

The cool thing for me about publishing my thoughts on the net is that it pushes me to read, re-read, and re-write what I’ve written, so whoever reads it doesn’t think I’m an illiterate jackass. I get annoyed, when I visit blogs where the author obviously hasn’t read through what he or she has written in order to weed out errors in spelling and grammar. And even more so when there are complete sentences, which are so ineptly written that they don’t make sense thereby depriving you the point of the story. I try to make sure that whatever I put up here has been read through and checked for spelling errors and that it’s fairly comprehensible for whoever might read it (you might not notice that, but that’s because you haven’t read the horrible first drafts I’ve written).

So I started writing again and almost immediately I started looking forward to doing so every day. I try to make time for writing every day and I try to write while whatever I want to talk about is still fresh in my memory. The first weeks I just wrote for myself. Nobody visited the site and Google hadn’t picked it up, but I didn’t really care. I felt confident in the old saying: “If you build it, they will come” and besides I was writing more just to get into the habit of writing again every day. Then suddenly I got mentioned on the Blogger site and people started coming by. And my friends suddenly noticed that I’d been writing here for a while without mentioning it and they started coming by. And that’s great. It really is. But at the same time it has made me aware of some of the things that I have to stay away from, because my blog is actually getting visited now.

There are two things I hate, when bloggers do:
1) Make entries without content added to let readers know that the blogger is bored, but still around.
- I can imagine that at some point I will have to start prioritizing my time, so I don’t spend hours every day writing. But hopefully I’ll never be so unimaginative that I won’t have something to say about a story I’ve read, a show I’ve seen, an album I’ve heard, or a person I’ve met. If my life was so boring that the only comment I had to make about my life was that I was bored, I’d reconsider wasting people’s bandwidth and time with my entries. If you're bored living your life, how do you think we feel reading about it?

2) Make entries mentioning life changing events, but then saying that they’re not ready to talk about them yet.
- I met a guy last year, who had a blog that he’d been updating for a while. I checked it a few days after we’d met and then I checked it again this week. The blog has been discontinued, but the last entries are filled with references to changes in his life, but no hints as to what they might be. Maybe I’m being selfish, but I find it annoying that someone would hint at an interesting story and then not tell it. If you know you’re not going to tell the story, then don’t mention it in the first place.

You might find these two points idiotic, self-righteous, and condescending, and you might even be right. But if you are a blogger, or you’re thinking about becoming one I suggest you read Why Web Journals Suck all the same (I also enjoyed reading this article). If nothing else it’ll make you think about, why you are writing or thinking about writing and what someone visiting your blog might be looking for from your writing. A blog isn’t a secret diary. It’s public and eventually someone will read it and when that happens I think it would be nice if they enjoyed it enough that they’d like to come back some other time. Don't you?