Blogging and a Reflection on this Blog

Blogs are ubiquitous. Online space is a lot cheaper than print mediums, and it's easy to distribute to people, as long as they have internet access. In fact, blogs have become so ubiquitous that social media websites actually help users filter blogs (e.g. http://technorati.com/ or http://www.blogpulse.com/) to the identify the most relevant. Blogs make it much easier to get "published" (ie. have work accessible to a large number of people).

One of the successful uses of a blog is to keep its readers informed of a particular area of information. Political blogs, scientific blogs, and business news blogs are some examples, where knowledgeable people can share information and references with their readers. Another successful use for blogs is to use it as a marketing tool to announce product releases and promotions. And lastly, there is the blog to keep friends and family updated on your activities.

The topic of this blog is the appreciation the craftsmanship of the work I see around me. This means that I am not necessarily knowledgeable in the topics of my posts and that it's not a summary of my activities for my friends and family. So, who am I writing for and why write a blog?

One of my initial (unmentioned) intentions with this blog was to write regularly so that I may improve my writing. Part of making this available publicly was to have people reading my work and encouraging me to write more. Blogs were good for this--a way to publish text quickly and share it with people. After, a while, I dropped this blog lower on my priority list, I still will not update it regularly.

Although I initially thought this would be interesting to the general reader, I have come to the conclusion that this is a personal blog and a personal project. The blog format is still useful to organize my work (chronologically and with tags) and to have it easily accessible from location to location, so I will continue to write as I make time to. But now, especially due to the infrequent posts, this should be considered a private blog, not a public one. This blog will be left publicly viewable for the occasional casually interested reader.

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Note: http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000493.html reports over 70 million blogs tracked by Technorati as of three years ago and that the growth had been increasing.