New Years Resolution

My resolution this year is to be a useful blogger. Useful, in that the time I spend blogging I can turn around and say, see that served a purpose and someone actually read it and took something nice away. Useful in that I am actually sharing with a larger community in true blogging spirit. Plus the kicker, I want to maintain it regularly for the whole year.

I am what I will charitably call, a scattered blogger. I have blogs on Blogger, Typepad, .mac, myspace, livejournal, diaryland, and of course now, WordPress. I have an iBlog published somewhere I can’t remember. I have blogs on hosts that no longer exist. I have used ecto and MarsEdit and countless other blogging software that still clutter up my applications folder despite the fact I have used them in 3 or so years. I have a folder on my bookmarks bar dedicated to those on button blogging and blogrolling solutions b-roll it furl-it, de.li.cious-it, digg-it, u-name-it, I’ve-got-it. I have passwords to sites I don’t even remember visiting. I have blogging widgets on my dashboard. I have more than 10 blogs, all woefully neglected (I refuse to count them, it’s depressing.) I tried to consolidate them , but who wants to read a blog about everything? I have dozens of draft entries never published because I don’t have the time to proofread, properly research my links, or finish that thought. I have draft entries and ideas in my computer stickies, on napkins, receipts. It got to a point, that I spent more time adding crazy little widgets, and do-dads to my blogs than I did actually writing anything.

Not surprisingly, I got Bloggers Burnout. Well, first I got confused and then burnt out. Why would anyone torture themselves Like this you ask? Well, for starters, I could never find just the right host that let me have the layout I wanted, or a suitable place to put pictures, or I didn’t have as much to say on a subject as I originally thought, or blah blah blah ad infinitum. I have a hard time just letting a blog be, well, just a blog.

Quite surprisingly, I rarely seek out an audience for any of these blogs. You’d think I’d want to share the fruits of so much labor. Blogging is supposed to be a public forum. What is the point of blogging in a vacuum? I guess for me just writing and putting together an entry is enough fun. Actively seeking out readers and then keeping track of responses that you do get made it seem more and more like a job, because you do have a responsibility, I think, for what you put out into the world.

Luckily, all this vast blogging experince has given me more focus on what I actually want to share in a blog and what I’m happy to keep to myself. And this blog I think is ready to be shared. So I guess I’m pushing it out and seeing if it floats. A hopeful resolution, I think for a generally, resolution-phobic blogger in a vacuum.

This one will be different. This one will be the one that sticks. This one will be Neo.*

*Nerdy Matrix reference.