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It’s funny. If you asked me before I started blogging if I’d get into it, I’d have laughed it off. Up until the day I started blogging, I didn’t figure myself for one. But I had a few things to say and figured I’d give it a shot. Here I am more than a year later still working at the keyboard and loving every minute of it and I needed to stop and think about the why. I mean, it was down for a month which for most hobbies of mine would have been a death knell, once I stop doing something I find it very easy to continue not doing it but with blogging I felt a nagging urge to keep going.

A few days back I came across Corvida’s reasons for blogging her main thesis being that passion should be the prime motivator. I wholeheartedly agree. For me blogging is a hobby, a cathartic exercise that pays off in many things of which money is not one of them.

Let me go back. There’s two primary reasons I started this blog. The first was discussions I had with my buddy Scott. I have a lot of opinions. Very strong ones. I’m convinced they’re right all the way to the instant someone convinces me otherwise, typically that person would be Scott – we worked together and so chatted a lot about techy stuff and the state of things and we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of topics. I realized that perhaps there were other opinions I held that I didn’t talk so much about that might actually (and I know you may find this difficult to believe…) be wrong!! I’ve always thought very positively of J.S. Mill’s marketplace of ideas theory (and I may have it completely wrong – it was a very long time ago, that intro philosophy class, but it’s more or less the only thing I’ve ever remembered from it) – where you need the debate to really get at the truth. An opinion must be held up for all to see and be defensible and be changeable when it is proved wrong, if it isn’t changeable, well then it’s just a prejudice.

So, in my head this blog would be my starting point to develop this marketplace as my words would enflame the typing skills of cogently disagreeing readers and a torrent of back and forth would ensue. It has, I’m sad to say, not achieved this goal very well. Not surprisingly it requires a very high level of traffic to get moderate levels of comments and while I get more traffic than I had ever aspired to and probably deserve, it’s not enough to have any sustained level of debate. Fortunately, through the good graces of the folks at FriendFeed there’s a pool of conversation to step into and some of it swirls around my postings and plenty more around others, so for that I’m thankful!

My secondary reason is that I’m generally terrible at staying in touch with folks. I thought, if I posted some stuff my buddies might periodically check it out and leave a message. Well, that part thankfully has proven true. It’s a great mechanism, very basic and low pressure. It’s not a lot, but it keeps everyone in mind.

So my blog, being my blog, ignores the first rule of blogging. The one you see on every blogging advice site which is focus, focus, focus! This blog is about everything I find interesting, it’s a lot of tech stuff, although across the spectrum from social media to development to tech company m&a. But it’s also the random crap I come across, the books, movies and music I like. While it rarely features anything in particular about me, it’s an intensely personal blog – or at least, the writing of it is an intensely personal experience for me. I’d have thought I’d burn out on it, but the opposite has happened, the more I’ve blogged the more I want to blog and it’s because it’s a passion for me, everything I write about is something I’m interested in, something I have an opinion on, something I want to explore further, something I want to share with my friends. How can you lose interest in your own interests? So I implore you my most valued non-CPC providing statistic, if I say something dumb call me on it, because when you don’t I just continue thinking I’m right and as my wife will tell you, that doesn’t do anyone any good.