Why Blog?

I notice no evidence that my blog has generated any effect on others. If one just wanted to make notes on-line for one's own use, you would pull up your favorite text-editor and create a simple file for reading at some time later, but implicit in creating a blog is that you thought that what you write would generate some interest in others.

Now, people could be lurking, reading without the need to respond, but enjoying what they see, but not feeling the need to respond.

Or maybe the rate of activity on a blog is too low. It seems that people need to post to their blog every day, maybe many times a day, to generate some kind of activity hit so that the engine that says "new" sees the blog and it gets promoted to the top of some hit list. Maybe blogs that have low activity get bumped down to the end of some mythical list of active blogs.

There has to be more to it than that. There has to be some hit of interest with the comunity that reads blogs, and no activity means no interest from that community. One can respond in the way a marketer would and ask "What do I need to do to get attention?" and act accordingly, but because the price of entry is low, one could just as easily say "To thine own self be true and to hell with other people." If thei aim is mearely to have a low-overhead way to say things in a public space and not be attached to being noticed, then I guess there is no loss.

One way to deal with the curiosity about why one would create a blog that generates no interest is to look at lots of other blogs in this same space, and I have. The range of styles and the appeal is very broad and bewildering. Some of the lesson appears to be that most of the people, but not all, are quite different from me in being younger, on the other hand I am technical having been associated with computers when they were made up of discrete circuits, but I am not presenting myself here that way.

Still, this problem is now a curiosity. Surely, there has to be someone out there who likes what I've said here, and maybe all I need to do is to say what I have to say more regularly, or maybe the audience is just not interested in what I have been saying, which brings me back to the original question: Why do this anyway?

I was going to do this on my web site, but my sysop didn't want server side scripts to run, meaning PhP scripts to dynaically update my site. I still had to edit my pages and upload them statically to the server, so I decided to try this as a means to dash off ideas here and there. Maybe I ought not to care about an audience as one of the goals was to write pretty much what was on my mind at the moment.