Juli has started with the blogging thing again, and wonders aloud about all the people she knows who have these bloggie things and somehow manage to keep churning out text day after day. How do we do it? Why?

As near as I can tell it’s random chance, finding a person who digs the blog. Some people really get into these sorts of things; some people, like my wife, make one really interesting entry, get a 100 hits the first week, and never post again. I have pushed, prodded and pulled almost every friend I have in Denver into trying out the format. Some jones on it, some don’t, some post all the time, some post in time with the lunar cycle, or never write anything at all after the initial flurry of ideas. I have no ability whatsoever to predict who will and who won’t. I’ve also realized that who does, who doesn’t, what you write, and how you write it tells me a great deal about you — sometime a lot more than I thought I knew about people I’ve known a long time, and sometimes it’s something I already knew, but had forgotten.

I don’t know how I keep writing. I know that I want to, or that I need to, and that’s where all the rest of it comes from. Subject doesn’t matter as much as content. Everyone can posts links, but it’s not the links that people come around for, it’s the opinions about the links — the thoughts that grow up from out of them. Sometimes, people want to hear what you’ve got to say — I can’t imagine it’s because of the quality of the opinion, so I think it’s to hear another human voice talking about their kid, their job, their dog, their cat, the neighbors, the lawn, the car, or the freaking produce they buy at the store.

(We’ve got apples, plums, peaches, and banana’s today, by the way.)

People simply want to hear it, or (from my side of the screen) people want to say something… anything. It’s an audience, or the idea of an audience.

Or it’s just the sheer boredom of being at work with nothing else to do.