Five or six years ago, the venture fund I was running invested in a company that made content management software. In an early pitch, the execs laid out a number of business-specific uses for their software. And, they said, there was even a consumer application: people could use it to keep what was called a ‘weblog’.
I was unimpressed. A weblog? Apparently, they were sites where people wrote inane posts about their daily lives, about the weird things that interested them, then threw it all online in a chronological pile, hoping that people would read along.
It was the stupidest idea I’d heard in a while, I said. And I meant it.
But, at a subsequent board meeting, I agreed to give the whole ‘blogging’ thing a quick try, just to get a better feel for the software’s interface. I’d do it for a month or two, I figured, then get back to the more important stuff in my life.
At the end of the two months, however, when I stopped posting, I started getting angry emails. People I’d never even met had apparently been reading my site at work, and had quickly developed procrastinatory addictions. “Keep writing!” one reader urged me. “Otherwise, I’ll have to actually start doing work.”
So, despite my initial skepticism, I kept blogging. Even once the company that dragged me into it evolved away from consumer-facing software, I downloaded an early version of Movable Type, and kept writing away.
Since then, though, I’ve tended to have annual crises of confidence. I’ve looked at this habit that I somehow fell into backwards, and questioned why I do it. And, usually, I’ve claimed I would stop blogging, to transition the site towards something more feature-article driven, something that would encourage me to actually edit before posting, something that would allow me to focus in on topics that I’d like to write about, but that don’t seem to flow naturally when I’m simply banging out, day by day, whatever happens to be on my mind.
Sadly, it never lasts. Mainly because, whatever else it does for me, this site is the free equivalent of the therapist’s couch. Oddly enough, there’s something remarkably psychologically soothing about hashing through the things I’m thinking, knowing that people are listening, even if most of them are people I’m never likely to actually meet.
So, this year, rather than threaten wholesale redesign, major change or ground-up rethinking, after spending a few hours last night staring at the ceiling, I’m sailing through this year’s ‘what the hell am I doing this for, and how can I do it better?’ breakdown with only a minor change: I’m going to start categorizing posts.
Yes, I know, that doesn’t seem like much. But, in doing so, I’m hoping it will convince me to pay more attention to those categories I tend to neglect, will cause the volumes of writing to balance out over the different facets of my life.
I’m also hoping that, by lumping the better posts in each category together, it will encourage me to write longer series over time, knowing that people will still be able to easily find earlier, related posts. To that end, for example, I’m thinking of slowly posting up my half-written book on entrepreneurship, a chunk at a time. Certainly, it would do much more good if people read it than if it continues languishing on my hard disk.
So, in short, here’s my current list of what I think I’ve written about in the past, and what I’d like to keep writing about going forward:
Cooking
Culture Consumption (music, book and movie reviews)
Dating
Entrepreneurship
Filmmaking
Fitness
Interviews
Judaism
New York Life
Photography
Productivity
Quotes
Restaurant Reviews
Science & Technology
Style
Toys & Gadgets
Travel
Trumpet
Writing
The list may evolve slightly as I move forward, but I think it’s a fairly broad base. Expect to see category tags on posts and categorical index pages cropping up over the course of the month.
And, as ever, if you have thoughts, feel free to mail ’em in.
