To Blog or not to Blog

A while back Jonathan asked to be a guest poster on the blog. I’m not sure why, but he was passionate about it so I figured why not. Thus I now I have a Jay Leno/Joan Rivers to my Johnny Carson. I’m still trying to decide if this is a good thing or the worst mistake I’ve ever made. –Grant

So the other day I asked Grant how he would feel about a guest post on his blog. The conversation went something like this:

Grant: Sure, send it over here and I’ll make sure it meets my high standards before it gets posted.

Me: Standards? In your last blog you talked about eating rats!

Grant: Touché. I guess I’ve hit rock bottom.

Well, that’s not entirely true since I cited a blog topic from the future, but basically he said “Okay” and welcomed a change of pace from his standard blog scenario.

I broke down my first blog into a few steps. Honestly, I have no idea how many steps it will end up being, so we’ll just play it by ear.

Step 1: Get permission to post. Done.

Step 2: Come up with a blog topic. I thought that coming up with a topic would be easy, but that has actually proven to be the most difficult step in my process (which could be replaced by a more difficult step in later steps, I just don’t know yet). I could write a review about something, but everyone does that. I could rant about something, but then people would think that I am an angry person. I could complain about something else, but that is probably less interesting than ranting and besides, no one likes a complainer. After much consideration, it appears that this will be a blog about blogs. Somewhat redundant, don’t you think?

Step 3: Write. In progress.

Step 4: Review. I’ll do that later.

Step 5: Post. This comes after the review that I’m doing later, so you could say that step 5 will come later later.

Step 6: Observe blog statistics. I have always dreamed that any blog I write would be one to generate a lot of user interest, and that those people would leave lots of comments that would spur discussion and possibly form topics for later blog posts. As much as that would make my day, I’m predicting that there will be 2-3 comments, with at least two of those people asking me to never post on Grant’s blog again. If that ends up being the case, you can be sure that I will have a snappy comment rebuttal that will end all negative comments towards me (don’t test me on this one).

Step 7: Return to step 2.

I have thought about starting my own blog before, but as I see it, most people that do that quit updating after about three months (take Yan for example). As soon as the blog is created, there are constant entries, sometimes more than one a day. After a while, it turns into an occasional update, maybe once a week. After that maybe just an update once a month or so…and then after that the blog effectively takes a hiatus. I don’t want to do that, thus I’m starting small-scale on someone else’s blog. I guess we’ll just have to see how it goes.