When I started this one, I could hardly wait to excitedly tell all my friends about it. Naturally it was my hope - dare I say expectation - they'd drop whatever insignificant thing they were doing at that particular moment and read it.
And really, why wouldn't they? I'd do it for them. But the painful truth is I've always been more of a giver and the better friend in these relationships.
I might be getting off topic here.
Could it be that blogging is now the tech equivalent of home movies? Is it possible no one really wants to read each and every post I publish? Can the technique of asking a question to get the reader more involved ever be overused?
Friends and family all try to be nice and cushion the brush-off with something polite like, "Cool. I'll take a look at it later."
It's completely understandable.
First of all, there's only so much time in the day to be reading blogs. And while at last count there were over a bazillion blogs, only a few are really saying anything worth reading.
I think that problem could be solved if it weren't so easy to start a blog.
As it is now anybody with a keyboard, an internet connection and a bad idea can have a blog up and running in minutes. It needs to be harder than that. If it were, we could thin the herd and only people who really had something to say would be blogging. We'd have a lot fewer people posting family pics and talking about what they had for breakfast and why they liked it.
After all that's what Facebook is for.
Then there's choosing a subject matter. Many blogs have a theme appealing to particular interests. Which is fine, except that kind of segmentation narrows the already over-estimated audience too much (Can you tell I'm in advertising?). I've managed to avoid that pitfall by taking a completely random approach to the subjects I post about.
Much in the same way I do with my career. Or paying my bills.
Another important thing is to have someone read over your post before you publish, for typos and to make sure it makes sense and says what you want it to say. In fact I just asked my wife to have a look at this post.
She said, "Cool. I'll take a look at it later."
