What makes a blog a blog

When I first started this blog 9 or 10 years ago, it started as a journal. I wrote about my day-to-day activities, sharing about things I did, things I saw, things I was thinking about.

As the years went by the blog evolved. I had regular readers and I felt the need to enhance their experience by voicing opinions, making statements, talking about current events. It went away from events in my life to topical content. The frequency of posts began to rely on my mood. For example if I had a strong opinion on something, or maybe I was trying to get a rise out of my readers, or if I was trying to prove a point.

More and more I felt the need to appease my readers rather than just write the blog as a simple web log. Often I'd critique my own posts, pouring hours upon hours on a single post trying to perfect the grammar, and making sure each of my points were concrete, or making sure they were funny enough, or passed some kind of grade before I'd publish. I found more and more unfinished posts left in draft because I didn't think they were post-worthy. Soon, I was posting once a week, or less, once a month or less.

I was looking back today and also reflecting on whether or not other mediums have affected blog writing. Have applications like Twitter, Facebook and Buzz ultimately changed the blogging landscape?

The more I thought about it, the more I realize that blogs have their own niche on the information highway. Blogs tell the entire story. Not instances in time, not little updates or links to share, but the entire journey, from beginning to end.

It's this realization that I've decided it may be worth taking this up again. However infrequent my posts may be, I hope to once again tell a story.