Why do we blog?

It's amazing how many of my friends who blog have got updates at the minute that involve some sort of apology for not havingt posted more. I'll admit it, I do exactly the same thing. The strange thing is that of all of the links from this blog to others, it is really only Steve-o (and to a lesser extent Jeff Gulley and Sarah Flemming) who keep their blogs regularly updated.

So what's with this spate of inactivity in cyberspace? Is it that we are all leading such adult lives that we are leaving university behind and instead focusing on the working world and all the stresses that go with. Maybe, but I recall most of these people being equally busy throughout much of the last few years and still finding time to blog.

Alternatively, it may be the excuse that I often use - nothing exciting happens to me in my day to day life. Well that may be true but (and this is not meant to be an insult), but Steve-o leads a life as mundane as the rest of us, i.e. he works 9-5, enjoys going out and loves his sports and music and yet Steve-o manages to put together a blog which I generally find so interesting that I rarely am online each day without checking to see if it has been updated.

Another possibility is that we look at blogs of a higher quality of work that ours and feel somewhat embarrassed at how unprofessional or sometimes darn uninteresting our posts our. However, I can't buy that option either as it reeks of false humility as I am definitely arrogant enough to think that when I put my mind to it, I can churn something interesting. (Incidentally, this whole concept of false humility is definitely one for another entry).

However, if I am truthful, I know that the reason that I don't blog enough is that I no longer get the same attention out of it. If I wanted to make myself sound better, I would rephrase that and say I don't get the same kick out of it but let's call a spade a spade. When I started this blog, I did genuinely start it as a means of keeping in touch with Canadian friends who were near and dear to me. In the initial few months, I wrote often and indeed wrote quite well. The blog began many enjoyable MSN conversations and the compliments certainly helped feed my ego.

Somewhere down the line though I started to do two things. The first was that I stopped updating regularly out of nothing more that pure laziness and the second was that I did update, they were updates purely for that sake and as such were remarkably dull. Soon the MSN conversations and resulting compliments stopped and I started to go elsewhere to help fuel my ego. I would post the occassional decent entry (I still quite like "The Problem of Pain) but by and large my writing was substandard.

I'm not sure what the purpose of this entry was. Perhaps it was nothing more than a glorified "Sorry for not posting" entry but I hope not. Maybe just maybe, it is the start of me being a little more honest with the reader of this page and maybe just maybe in the potential resulting MSN conversations one or two original lines of thinking might come out.

Cheers for reading.
Tim