a convenient truth

I want to share a moment of angst.

I read a great comment about blogs perhaps two months ago, and it’s completely clobbered my blogging.  It’s taken some time for me to realise that this one comment has caused such a period of Bloggers Block.

The comment was from someone irritating like Dave Winer, but it struck something of a chord.  The gist was that the best blogs are those where people talk about what they know - but that the world is full of blogs where people sound off about things they know nothing about.  Unfortunately this struck home - this blog is full of me sounding off about subjects that I am, realistically, on the whole, clueless about.

Of course I’d love to think my opinion on any subject is by it’s very essence the purest gold; my every sentence dripping not only with sardonic vigour but such volumes of essential wisdom that readers are stunned into respectful silence.

Lying awake at 2am though, I know this is not the case, and to pretend otherwise is rather silly.  So, do I continue writing articles that might well be complete rubbish?  I have to say it never bothered me before, but the assertion that I am somehow participating in some huge exercise in dumbing down the Internet offended me somehow, all the more so since it could be true.

I know vast quantities of stuff about some extremely obscure things, but we have a work blog for that kind of stuff.  [Not that I use it, since it's the horrible Movable Type.  We have a new WordPress blog coming soon though (like our new website it's been coming soon for about a year), and then I might do some regular blogging there.]

So, a dilemma.  I do not yet know what I’ll do but at least having articulated the problem I may find a solution.  More likely, of course, I will get bored with the dilemma and proceed as before - blogging is a strange pursuit, since it’s purpose is so ill-defined, and I’ve yet to work out why I do it.