People v. State

Patrick at Popehat, in a post titled Blogging The Black Dog, asks blogging readers of Popehat: “What keeps you doing it?  How do you motivate yourself to post day after day?” Speaking for myself, I answered as follows in this comment:

The question of motivation is intensified for the beginning blogger, as I am. While many of us and even many popular bloggers like to think they “write for themselves,” critics be damned, the popular bloggers certainly have a motivational advantage, in that it’s difficult to get up the gumption to spend a significant amount of time writing something substantial if you know hardly anyone’s going to read it. A solution I hit on in my previous blog was to make my blog kind of an index of my commentary on other (popular) blogs. I’m a long time commenter on various blogs, and commenting, unlike blogging, comes much more naturally. None of that self-imposed pressure to produce, to create something out of nothing. A blogger writes something that catches your fancy, and you kind of just piggyback on it. No planning, no sweating over the details that characterizes my effort to post something on my own blog. (This comment itself typifies that; it may not be profound, but the post caught my attention and the comment just naturally followed in a matter of minutes.) Blogging isn’t all that more elevated than “commenting.” The blogger himself is typically “commenting” on something somebody else said. By making my blog an index of my comments on other blogs, blogs that unlike my own people are likely to read, I’m basically doing what I’d do anyway without as much risk of throwing away time and effort. And there’s always a chance (however remote) that over time the blogging commenter may gain a readership of his own. If not, not too much lost.

I’m not saying that I will “blog” solely in the fashion suggested in the above comment, but it’s something I’ll be experimenting with. After all, it’s been a week now since my last post. We can’t have that. I fully intend to keep this blog moving in whatever way the parameters of merely human as opposed to superhuman motivations allow. I may also experiment with the “Instapundit” style of blogging, sacrificing depth of commentary on links posted for volume of links posted. That style seemed to work out very well for the Instapundit himself, as his is one of the most popular blogs out there, despite the fact that he doesn’t seem to spend more than a minute or two on each post. His blog is more of an aggregator, which I’m already doing with my clip of shared items from my Google Reader public page in the sidebar. If instead of simply sharing these items I can “share” them in the blog posts proper with a clever title (with Fark.com also being a model and inspiration here) and a sentence or two of commentary, I could be in business.

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