Blog First Anniversary

This blog turns one year old today. This is of debatable importance, but it does offer a good opportunity for reflection.

One of my primary reasons for doing this blog is TO LEARN TO DO A BLOG. In the words of Michelangelo, “Still I am learning.” In some ways, I have just begun to scratch the surface of blogging. For instance, so far I have posted only text -- no audio or visual data. Only recently have I begun to post links to other URLs, and in particular to a blog at which I posted a comment.

This brings up the idea that I believe only a few people have actually READ anything on this blog. I do not advertise it, and I have not informed even my friends and relatives of its title or URL, so visitors are quite rare, though there are some attempts to leave spam/ad comments. The entire “comments” aspect is one of the things I am learning about blogging. For now, I enjoy the occasional comment, both for learning about the blog process, and for stimulating ideas and discussion, but I am fine with having an extremely limited audience.

Overall, I am satisfied with the first year of this blog, though in many ways it is sort of running behind schedule. It has been a busier year than I anticipated -- non-blog-wise -- and there has not been much time for writing or for learning the intricacies of blogging. Still, I AM learning.

There are three blogging problems for which I have not found any solutions:

1) Realistically, I probably do not have enough “free” time to do this blog. Free time is a complicated topic, and too complicated to discuss here (because, among other things, there is not enough TIME ...).

2) To a certain extent, everything I write in this blog builds upon what I have already written. Yet I cannot assume that someone reading one of my blog entries has read everything leading up to it. In my mind, none of my blog entries truly stand alone. As a minimum, all are dependent upon certain basic concepts, like the idea that written communication is fundamentally unclear, and the fact that I believe the rule about always placing periods inside of quotation marks is WRONG. More specifically, I sometimes realize as I am writing that I need to explore some other idea FIRST -- so I stop writing and instead write about that first idea before writing about the second idea ... but there is no guarantee that someone reading the second idea will have read the first idea.

3) I have strong opinions about politics, and would like to share them, but among my strong opinions is the idea that we have become so polarized politically that many people automatically reject any idea that they believe comes from “the opposing side”. I truly believe that if George W. Bush and Barack Obama were to give precisely the same speech, Republicans would praise Bush’s speech and condemn Obama’s, while Democrats would praise Obama’s and condemn Bush’s. Furthermore, I believe this goes way beyond politics. Once I start stating my opinions on politics, those who perceive that they are on “the other side” may not even seriously consider my opinions on music or dog-training. One of the main points of this blog is COMMUNICATION. I cannot communicate if people refuse to consider my ideas.

As I said, I have no ready solutions for any of these problems. Regarding time, I will probably just struggle along with slightly lowered expectations. I hope, on average, to post one new blog entry each week. Regarding the fact that each blog entry builds upon the previous ones, I will perhaps try to link back to some of my earlier entries. In some ways, I keep stating the same ideas over and over again, so perhaps it doesn’t matter so much whether anyone has read any earlier entries. Regarding the problem of alienating people who then decide to automatically reject my opinions, there is probably nothing I can do, so I hope to go ahead and post more on politics and other controversial topics in the coming year, especially considering that there is an important election coming up.

I also hope to post some sort of “about” or “profile” page. I have mixed emotions about this. I like the blog entries to speak for themselves, but I feel a sort of vague obligation to post SOMETHING about myself.

This brings up the fact that after a full year, what I refer to as “this blog” continues to exist as basically two twin blogs, with mostly identical postings. The two blog hosts have different formats, though, so some things will be different, including the “about” or “profile” page. In particular, one format encourages creating specific “pages” -- I may post a “quotations” page or a “basic truths” page on that blog, but I am not sure how I will go about posting that information in the blog that does not have specific “pages”.

I continue to wonder whether I will run out of things to write about. So far, I generally have much more in mind to write about than I have time to write, and I struggle with figuring out which topics to choose, and whether the order of topics makes a difference in clarity and understanding. I feel a bit ... well, I suppose the best word is “guilty” ... about the fact that I tend to write things well in advance of actually posting them online. It lacks a certain spontaneity, but it gives me a chance to reconsider my words, and especially to try and arrange my ideas in a certain logical order.

Perhaps I should focus more upon the fact that there is a very real question about whether most of my blog entries will ever be read by anyone else, so most of my concerns are totally academic.

Truth is complicated.