The habit of weblogging

Cory Doctorow writes about the effect blogging has had on his life as an “infovore” (via Erik Stattin). I’ve been thinking about this as well. Posting weblog entries the very instant ideas spring to mind seems to attract more ideas. Reflecting on a topic (or several) every day keeps my mind going.

The book One Continuous Mistake by Gail Sher suggests that it’s the “every day” part that’s important – that you have something that you “vow” to do every day. On days when I have no idea for a blog entry, I feel a bit frustrated, but when I let go, I often remember something I had meant to write about. But it requires that you get pass the obstacle of “desiring to blog” (or even “desiring not to desire to blog”, if you’re into Zen).

If you can’t let go, you probably will post entries that aren’t interesting – not even to yourself (which in weblogging is the only thing that matters, in my opinion). It’s a little like tricking yourself into believing that you won’t post anything today. When you succeed at this, topics will come to you.

What I mean by saying that the only thing that matters is that the topics are interesting to you, is, that if they are interesting to you, they become interesting to others. Partly because of the fact that you aren’t unique. Among the vast number of people on the Internet, there are several “yous”. But also because of the fact that someone’s writing about something that interests him or her (that he or she is passionate about) automatically gets interesting to other people.

So, you don’t have to care that much about your audience, as long as you passionately write things that you would want to read yourself. As soon as you think of someting: put it out there! You can always return to it later and clarify or correct. It doesn’t have to come out right the first time. What’s important is that it’s interesting to you and that you do it regularly. Gail Sher quotes Aristotle in her book: ”’We are what we repeatedly do,’ Aristotle said. ‘Excellence … is not an act, but a habit.’”