Blogging is about sharing. What characterizes the A-list bloggers in my mind is that they have the whole snark attitude down, and that's the most attractive thing to read. Doing humor, like at the poor man, or fafblog (which is way harder than saying 'heh. indeed.') draws fewer comments, because who can touch those bloggers on that score, and are you supposed to be funny in their comments, too?
And it's easy to look at the A-list bloggers, with their three to four hundred comments (per thread) and then gaze back at your own basket of goose eggs, and think, 'man, they're better than me'. I would freak out at my old blogspace (20six.com) when I got five or six comments on a post, plus two or three sweeties. I would feel a real responsibility to respond to each and every commenter, link to them, etc., always making sure that I said the right thing and let them know that I appreciated their commenting on something I had written. If I got twenty comments on a post, I'd likely give up blogging, or at least abandon the space I was at, and move somewhere else in a new guise. When blogging becomes a duty, and making sure everyone is recognized and linked to and so on sure feels like that, then it ceases to fulfill its main purpose for me, which is just letting off steam and sharing what's up here in this neck of the woods. It's cathartic, and never more so in the last year in dealing with the loss of my grandfather, during which time I have done extensive writing on him and what he meant to me.
I also tend to write on this site stuff that is hard to comment on, stuff about depression, alcoholism, relationships, and other touchy-feely topics. And after about six months I go back and look at some of the stuff I have posted, and delete a fair amount of it, thinking to myself 'whoa, that was too personal, need to be more generic'. And I just can't do it.
I liken it to my avid reading; I read a lot, and give away a lot of books, too. Most people just go 'cool, free books!' and never really reciprocate, and probably either sell the books, or pass them on to someone else. But on occasion, I get a 'hey! that's a great book' and strike a chord with someone, and we connect and chat about books. Rare, but it happens. And maybe we even become friends. In my nearly two years of blogging, most readers have come and gone, and yet I've actually hit it off with a fellow blogger or two, and that's something. Finding other voices in the wilderness in this modern disinformation age is reassuring, to say the least. Connecting with others is great, but connecting with yourselfdriving home a stake into the still-quivering body of the mainstream media --the main point of blogging-- is better still.
