If producing a regular column is living out loud, then keeping a daily blog is living at the top of your lungs. For a couple of months there, I was shrieking like a banshee.
I started blogging as a hobby, not really thinking anyone would read my site, just my friends.
I never really thought I would make a blog myself.
One of my greatest pleasures is writing on my Web site.
I've been blogging since the 80s. Okay maybe not that long. But starting around 2004, I launched and abandoned many blogs, and would continue to do so over the next decade.
Tumblr was simply a tool for anyone to make a blog like mine.
I think there's plenty of room for blogs that exist to pay the blogger, or blogs that exist to turn a profit. That's just not the kind of blog I'm writing, and I'm not the kind of blogger that could do that.
If I really have nothing to do, I just watch my cats, take some photos, and go back to my personal blog.
At one point, I was blogging prodigiously, in the late '90s; and I was getting, like, millions of pages because I was, like, one of the only people writing about web design, and I was always writing about web design.
I think blogging, by and large, is basically therapy. And I'm sure, and I know, that there are some terrific bloggers and some legitimate bloggers. But I think, by and large, a huge percentage of people who are blogging are doing it for self-therapy.
When I got laid off, I would write my friends these 15-page-long emails. This was before people had personal emails, and my friends would tell me that I was going to get them fired if I kept sending them stuff, so I started a website.
The funny thing is that I used to be a blogger, but it wasn't known as 'blogging' at that time. This was in the '99/2000 time frame.
Just to see if I liked vlogging, I uploaded a video of my sister and I cleaning up a river in a canoe for Earth Day. The sound was horrible, and the quality was horrible... But you have to blog what's interesting to you and not care what anyone thinks.
I also like to use a sensational headline. Many people read blogs in aggregators, which generally show only the headline. So you have to give people a reason to click through. Blogs need to be real and personal. Reading it should be like hanging out with you. I play music for my readers. I show them videos I like. I tell them what I did over the weekend. And I tell them what is happening in the technology, Internet, and VC markets.
