Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Seema blogged recently about what makes a successful blog, but I think a bigger question is What makes a successful blogger? Forget about the fame - what makes one blogger happy and the next one frustrated?

I was writing to a friend who’d burned out on blogging about the flood of information that any blogger faces. Even if you’re just blogging about your own personal life, there are 24 hours a day of that to be distilled into a few paragraphs of blog. The secret to blogging joy is being able to write exactly as much as you want to write to convey what you want to convey.

Maybe you have deep ideas or maybe you have cutesy links, maybe you want to keep your finger on the weak pulse of the MBTA or be an alpha geek content provider. But there will always be more ideas, more links, more T derailments, and more geeking. You have to draw the line somewhere, and do it without guilt.

That’s where the little psychopathy comes in handy. Once upon a time, blowing people and responsibilities off was considered impolite. Now it’s expected and necessary. The internet is a world of procrastinators, where only the most interesting things get done, and whole websites, fandoms, and people fall by the wayside when the interest wanes. You won’t be happy on-line unless you can put off answering email or blogging that so-so blog entry indefinitely (which is to say, forever). You need to be one with the asynchronous nature of the net, which is to say, you have to be able to procrastinate your troubles away or you’ll get an ulcer.

The net belongs to the slackers.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 28th, 2004 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.