The Costs of Blogging
This is too good: Tom Mangan says don't believe the blogging hype:
Blogging is not free. It has a cost, paid out in time spent on things that don't get done because the blogger is busy typing and linking. Every minute doing this is a minute not doing something else, whether it's tending to their kids or devising strategies for world peace.
Absolutely. Everything costs something. If what you are doing is "free", it's costing you the time that you could use to do something that will make you money. If you have a laundry business, and it takes up all your waking hours, it prevents you from having a web design business as well. By blogging, you're spending time you could be spending betting on ponies at the track, or whatever else it is you should be doing if it weren't sitting at the computer annotating links (like stopping the whining and just get a girlfriend for crying out loud).
Blogging is not easy to do well. It's a lot like work: the rewards reflect the effort, talent and time devoted to the blog, combined with the interest in the subject matter. You need all four for a blog to get any traction.
The really great bloggers have all four of the above. Some don't have the time, but I suspect they're the ones who sacrifice sleep in order to blog. Not me: I value sleep highly.
Blogging is lonely. You can spend hours crafting the perfect post and get no response. Or you can spend 15 seconds linking to "what were your favorite songs this year" and get an-all day debate. There's no telling what will catch people's fancy, and this tends to test your sanity.
True enough. Some people don't care about responses and do it for the love. And people seem to respond better to the fluff crap you link than the really heavy personal stuff. So it's not really worth talking about the heavy personal stuff, but the great thing about blogging is that people do it anyway.
Blogging is an art form -- with all the suffering that implies. The dedicated blogger is like the artist who cannot imagine doing anything else. Days, weeks, months and years are devoted to fretting over the tiniest details, and there's a fair chance that one's greatest achievements will be misunderstood or ignored.
Suffering is, oddly, a way to get people to keep reading your site. (I once asked what one friend liked about my weblog, and she said it was because of "the despair". I wasn't sure to take that as a compliment or not.)
To this list I would add that blogging is not revolutionary. The Internet has been revolutionary, or at least its promise was. Blogging is just one of the steps towards delivering on that promise.
