Once more, why dos’t thou blog?

Recently there was a comment to one of my post asking the perennial question that non-bloggers ask of bloggers, (and bloggers ask of themselve all the time too 🙂

"Hello,
I was wondering if you could answer these 3 simple questions for a school project about blogging. It would be great if you could help me out. THANKS

  1. How did you get into blogging?

  2. What drives you to blog about something?

  3. How has blogging affected you?"

If you search around you will find numerous people who have answered this question over the years, including my own self. So I won't wax too philosophically but just give you my gut responses to these questions:

  1. "How did you get into blogging?" I checked my records, and my first post was about four years ago. At the time I was just fooling around, starting to read certain blogs religiously, and decided to see what the world looked like from the writers side. So, like many things I got into, it was pretty much an experiment, pretty random.

  2. "What drives you to blog about something?" It varies. Often I discover something, figure something out, see something that piques my interest. Working solo, I don't have the outlet that I used to have while working in an office to pop over to someone and share my insight, joy, amusement, amazement, whatever. No office to pop over to. So this blog becomes an outlet for that same impulse. Now that I have a (bit of) an audience (see all my posts about Search Engine Optimization) there are occasionally other motivations, like wanting to bring attention to something or someone by linking to it from this blog.

  3. "How has blogging affected you?" I can't say it has affected me that much. I go through spurts of blogging and not blogging and I always enjoy it. It's kind of my personal scratch pad or notebook of stuff that I want to get out of my head and 'down on paper' and so it's enjoyable. Now that I've been doing it for several years, I have quite a public record on what I care about, believe, am interested in and so on, so, for better or for worse, this blog has become a significant component of my public resumé or reputation.