What am I doing here?
Seriously, what made me think it would be a good idea to start a I-don’t-even-want-to-call-it-a-blog when I’m neither a good writer nor have anything substantial to say? Wouldn’t my obvious need for self-expression be better served by a regular hobby, like say, photography or video games?
The sad truth is that - after making fun of MySpace for years - I have suddenly bought into this web 2.0 idea that having an opinion means you’re entitled to share it with everybody, thereby effectively turning into a prime example of a New Media Douchebag (NMD). I blame Twitter for this change of heart, because Twitter made the echo chamber seem fun and engaging instead of desperate and vain. You could interact with strangers on topics that were interesting to you and the strict 140 character limit ensured that everything was kept short ‘n’ sweet and didn’t wander off into ego-stroking tangents (we had forums for that).
But soon enough I found that 140 glyphs are not very much when you have a link and a long @username in there and when I found myself segmenting tweets to get my point across, the appeal of a long-form medium like a blog became apparent. Most people I follow on Twitter either write for big websites or have their own personal blog where they can link to if a topic deserves more ink than Twitter can provide. And yes, sometimes I do have an opinion that I want to share and argue with others about. Why not?
So, a blog it was going to be.
But after the fun of reviewing blogging services, signing up with tumblr, deciding on a suitably obscure name and picking a theme, I realized that I needed some content ASAP, because just linking to funny web comics wasn’t going to carry the day (that I could do just fine on Twitter). And then I discovered what any real writer already knows:
Writing is hard.
I have 3 posts in the drafts queue that all sounded like good ideas at first but now they sit there and won’t write themselves. Simply thinking “I should write about this” won’t cut it anymore. Now I have to do it, to actively pursue an idea and mold it into a coherent and presentable form, in a language that I understand well enough but don’t speak natively. And all this preferably with some kind of regularity because nobody likes to read a blog that’s only updated every three months or so.
What a stupid idea.
…
(But I’m gonna try it anyway.)
