Melissa poses some interesting questions on blogging this week:
How long do you plan to blog? Have you ever considered that? Is it something you plan to continue until you get bored? Or until you find something better to do? Or do you consider it to be a life long thing? What about your fellow bloggers? Your blogging friends… Do you think they plan to continue for the rest of their lives?
I was actually thinking about this just the other week, as I was realising that, yet again, it was days between each time I posted an entry and even longer between each I time posted something that was not an answer to a meme or a quiz result. I’ve never been able to keep up a journal for more than a couple of weeks whenever I’ve tried writing one on paper. This is one of the reasons I love blogging, the knowledge that someone out there might read the entries and actually check back to see if I’ve posted certainly motivates me more than the thought that “I might enjoy reading this some day” which has been the only real motive for journalling on paper.
In some form I’ve had a “blog” almost as long as I’ve had a webpage (getting to be close to ten years now), as I’ve always had a “what I’ve been reading lately” section. The blog-as-journal, though, is a relatively new thing for me, as you can see from the archives I started in April 2002.
Like Melissa I have a problem considering doing anything “for life”. Sooner or later I expect blogging will be something I used to do. On the other hand, blogging is a relatively new “thing”, and who knows, by the time I decide I’m bored with it, it might have become an outdated mode of communication anyway and we’ll all be caught up in a new fad (whether at the forefront of the movement or with all the inevitable hangers-on at the back).
For the foreseeable future, though, I’d like to keep doing this. I’m enjoying it, after all, or I wouldn’t have kept going past the initial couple of weeks. I suspect I’m going to continue as I’ve started – writing loads in periods and then nearly going mum at other times, but then any relationship (of the friendship-type) tends to be a bit like that – you see a lot of a certain person for a period and then for one reason or another you hardly see each other for weeks, months or years, and then you suddenly see each other quite often again and so on. At least my relationships tend to be like that.