Ok, maybe not quite a week, but pretty close to it. And I have been writing, just not blogging. My work moves me around and there are times when-shockingly-I don’t have the internet close at hand. Yes it is possible to use a dial up connection, but just thinking of that slow death was enough to make me just step back and think about my life as a blogger.
I had hopes of becoming a professional blogger and making a living from my random thoughts and silly observations. But I have not quite figured out how to do that yet. So I keep writing and waiting for that day in some distance future when I have ten thousand pages of content and, as the Underpant Gnomes like to say-Something Happens.
For the most part, blogging is fun-So maybe I have a psychological problem with making a living from it. You can have fun and make a living at the same time, can you? Well, it can be fun taking portraits, but mostly its a lot of work.
I have learned a lot about stats, have come to expect my blog posts to be in the Google Top Ten on a regular basis, and have read way too many ebook trying to sell other ebooks. In the real world there has long been a scam where you place classified ads saying something like Make Thousands in One Week-Send me ten dollars to find out how! When someone sends in the ten dollars they are told to place ads all over the place that say Make Thousands in One Week. . .a lot of ebooks work on that formula.
The internet is big. There are ways to make millions and billions online, as eBay, Amazon, and Google have made perfectly clear. There are ways to make real money as a blogger as well, as John Chow, Boing Boing, Tech Crunch, and countless others have shown as well. It’s all about numbers. It’s all about content. It’s all about being useful.
I’m not at all sure what its all about any more. There is so much stuff out there and more stuff being whipped out everyday.
If you write it they will come-maybe.
So in my week of blog exile, I stopped and thought for a bit, why do I blog? No real answers float up out the void. If I figure it out sometime I’ll let you know.
I know what you mean about the ebooks. I downloaded some. They urged me to download others, and it wasn’t long before I had a folder full of junk.
Some are fun to read, but they are all pretty useless.