It’s your thing, do what you wanna do

I started writing this as a comment on Matt’s dos and don’ts for webloggers, but I think this is a better place for it.

The rules Matt writes about apparently (lol) work for his blog and personality and reading habits. However, as regarded long-time blogger Rebecca Blood writes in her essay on the history of weblogs, The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a […] particular mixture of links, commentary, and personal observation unique to each individual site [which] has always given each weblog its distinctive voice and personality.

My particular mixture is my own, but it’s influenced by what, and how, I read. On my blogroll are a lot of blogs that are little more than the occasional essay interspersed into an extended link dump, many others that are comprised of short commentaries on a link or two, and a few that are basically personal journals. And when I do one of my occasional prunings, those are among the first to go. The ones that I keep are made up of a mixture of different topics, lengths and styles. I have no idea or care about the frequency at which the writers post, because I’m subscribed to a large enough number of them that there’s always something new and interesting for me to read.

I joke from time to time about my “audience of none”, but it’s because that’s all I expect. Just because I write something doesn’t mean people are forced to read it, whether it’s at work—where I’d been blogging, unregarded and mostly unnoticed, for four and a half years before others started last month—or on my own site. If people find some value (whatever that may be) in what I write, when I write it, they’ll read it and maybe even come back; if they don’t, they won’t.

So here’s my own personal list of blogging dos and don’ts:

• Do blog when you feel like it. Don’t write because someone expects you to.
• Do write about what you want to, the way you want to. Don’t squelch your own style.
• Don’t expect an audience. Do appreciate an audience if, and while, you have one.
• Do come up with your own rules. Or don’t; it’s your blog, you can do with it as you please.