Why I Blog

April 25 2007

Josh at Pinotblogger was kind enough to tag me with a conversation thread making its way around the blogosphere around the topic of “Why I blog.”

It’s simple enough, and restated the question is: ‘Why the hell do you write stuff (essentially) for free on the internet.’

I got the idea to start blogging in February of ’05 as I read Business 2.0 magazine pool side in Naples, FLA while on vacation with some friends and my wife. The article was about a 20 year old kid who wrote a cell phone blog and was making $5000 bucks a month and I thought, ‘I can do that.’

At the same time, I was writing a business plan for a wine retail shop.

Ultimately, the wine business plan was front and center for my free time as I legitimately tried to get it off the ground.

When I realized (actually it was pointed out to me) that if you rub two nickels together you still only have 10 cents and that I didn’t have the financial wherewithal to start a business that was inventory intensive and required, by law, payment to suppliers within 15 days, I started looking at alternative outlets for my wine passion.

I came back to the blogging thing as a way feed the beast, so to speak; a way to express my ideas.

At the point I wanted to finally start a blog (September of ’05) I wasn’t terribly in tune with the blogging services aside from Blogger.com and I wanted to have greater control over the site than what Blogger afforded so I got stuck in a tangle of open source content management software review and chose a program called Mambo. Mambo, at the same time and unfortunately for me, had the open source project forked by its development team and they went off to create Joomla.

At the same time I couldn’t get the damn Mambo install to work and documentation was scarce. Nor, in fact, could a buddy of mine who is an administrator for a large-scale content management solution get it to work, either.

Having burned at least four months monkeying around with Mambo, I finally scrapped it for a TypePad account figuring that the most important thing was to just get started—which I did, finally, in January of ’06.

That’s the backstory to how I started blogging, but the real question is, ‘why do you blog?’

I blog because I have a tremendous passion for wine, it’s my #1 hobby, and I also have a lot of creative energy that needs an outlet. I can’t draw or do anything artistic even though I feel like I have an artistic sensibility. But, I can write a little bit. I had neglected this outlet for 10 years, not realizing that I needed to express myself creatively in some form. If I didn’t blog, I would probably start writing a book. It’s cathartic to me and a stress reliever to take ideas and put them together in ways that maybe haven’t been put together before.

I think it might be cliché to say so, but for me it’s the process of writing, it’s not the result. I don’t do it with any motives other than self-satisfaction.

My blogging is completely narcissistic and self-indulgent.

I really didn’t have any traffic at all for the first couple of months and if you check out some of my posts from early on you’ll see that my style hasn’t really changed in between doing it for myself without anybody checking it out and doing it today for a slightly larger audience. Blogging for me is really more about me getting stuff down on paper and mentally reconciling ideas than it is for other people’s enjoyment—which is why I write 500 – 1000 word posts when blog wisdom suggests that this is ridiculous. Nobody wants to slog through 900 words on a blog post, but I approach it like a newspaper columnist would – with context and a narrative where you have a beginning, a middle and an end with an opinion. And, I also write like a live rock show. One take. Everything I write is written in one stream of consciousness and one sit down session. Only, perhaps, three or four times have I ever written something and slept on it to come back to it. I like the immediacy of tapping a vein and then publishing it for permanence.

I redesigned the site professionally because I wanted the aesthetic to reflect the content, like a great cover to a book.

Ultimately, I blog for myself; it’s my hobby and is centered around something that I really enjoy—wine. If other people like the site than that’s great, and if they don’t that’s okay too, because I’d still do it. The original inspiration of a dude making $5000 a month is a moot point because I do it for free and that’s a part of the creative process and the purity of writing about ideas that amuse me.

I’m tagging Renee at Feed Me/Drink Me. Renee, why do you blog?