Over the Christmas holidays I have been bombarded with essays, assignments, group work, application forms and exams, so it is somewhat obvious that I have not had a lot of time on my hands to blog. Bizarrely this has left me feeling guilty, like I am somehow depriving my (albeit few) readers of my views and opinions. But this is surely not the case; there are so many blogs out there that it has become very difficult to keep up with them all (just try working your way through feed demon having left it for a week) and therefore blogs who don’t have frequent posts can just fall behind. This doesn’t seem to be a major problem, all blogs can be picked up again when time allows, so where is this feeling of guilt coming from?
After thinking this over whilst not being able to sleep last night (insomnia is a wonderful thing isn’t it?) I realised the pressure I appear to be feeling about my lack of posting comes from the overwhelming amount of posts written by others. There are blogs I visit that have up to eight posts a day and I’m aware other blogs have even more; but what is the reason for this?
Personally I blog when there is a reason to, when I want to have a little rant about something or offer helpful tips to other students for example. I never blog for the simple sake of blogging. I can’t help but wonder if others do?
In my opinion blogging should serve the purpose of an online diary, personal to you whilst providing interesting and insightful reading for others. It should not be “oh crap I haven’t written one in a while”, “”what will people think of me if I don’t?” or ”I don’t want to lose subscribers” posts. These tend to be rather obvious, dull and frankly pointless. Bloggers need to stop worrying about their number of subscribers and Technorati rankings and just write what they think- it really will be a lot more enjoyable to read than the “oops, sorry I haven’t written in a while” post.
