A friend asked me last week, why do you and other people blog? My answer was simply, ‘vanity’. This insightful analysis was apparently delivered during the Santa Pub crawl, or so I was told a day later when I asked for some details of my actions after around 10pm.
Later after a couple Tylenol and a few bacon-cheese burgers (Farhan you’re secret is safe with me) my feelings aren’t much different but could be expanded a bit.
Personally I think there are roughly three groups of Bloggers:
- Professionals who have an insight into a company or industry and decide to write about it – if they tried they could secure a column in a newspaper – somewhere
- People who have a lot to say, want to say it and desperately think that everyone else wants to read about it. Or if there isn’t a very large cost, don’t care if people read it. This group would love to write in a paper but frankly don’t have the knowledge of the people above.
- People who want to meet other people, get lai, err really meet other people, or want to create webpages that offend those who have any knowledge of website design.
- Hmm, maybe there are four: people who have absolutely nothing to say, say it anyway and are happy because they ‘got it off their chest’
What drives them? Except possibly for the first, there is very little revenue involved in the subject – thus why ‘spend’ time? First, it costs very little but still no reward, only less expense. So, the reward must focus non-financial things – we write because we want to; we write publicly because we can talk about our lives more here than during the once-a-year dreaded ‘This is what I did this year’ letter. Vanity or ego start becoming logical choices,(and one can possibly draw out that getting lai, hmm, really meeting other people); it helps the our ego.
A ‘this is what I did this week’ email would be nightmarish to all those people who really couldn’t give a monkey’s butt or were frantically drafting their own. Now, we just post and let all those other people surf to it because with over a billion people surfing the web – there’s possibly some other people really interested. For me, I’ve estimated around a 0.0055% of the web world {(55,000 hits)/1 billion people on the web} actually care. (small family in case you wondered)
Not too bad considering I am completely relevant to points #2 & #4, with a majority of posts falling into #4.
Earlier this week Gardner announced that the rush to blog is starting to taper off and will most likely peak in early 2007. Since this breakdown is relevant for the part of the world that has Internet access; we’ll probably be able to deduce how many people in the world are fairly humble and those, who in some way are not.
If you are reading this, and realise you’re one of us, but haven’t started: click here
As for me, probably going to go stare at a mirror for a while, before getting back to FEB. ;)
Link to Tech Trends – Gartner Predicts the Blogosphere’s Future
