But on the drive home, I thought about it a bit, and decided that it's no different than exercise or a diet or studying a foreign language or any other hobby. If it matters to you, you'll carve out a bit of space in your life for it. You'll focus those few extra minutes in the super market line, or a boring meeting, or driving home from a house warming party thinking about something to blog.
And once you've been doing it for a couple of weeks, suddenly everything becomes a potential blog post. If you're a cat-blogger, a trip to the vet with Mr. Bigglesworth is something you need to tell the world. If you're a Twitter user, even a trip to the toilet becomes a notable event: In men's room at Macys. Stall has no TP. Oh yeah, there's plenty of time for blogging.
The real trick is finding something interesting to say.
When I started back in January, I aspired to post Paul Graham-esque soliloquies of insight that would move my vast armies of readers to stroke their collective chins and ponder, That Williams... we think he's on to something! But alas, within only a handful of posts, my content had devolved to stuff like this. There was just no way to keep up even a fraction of Jack Handy Deep Thoughts and still post regularly.
So I came up with this set of impromptu rules that has made blogging a lot more fun and manageable for me:
1. No 'me too' posts.
RSS feeds for Alarm Clock and Tech Crunch mean you're drowining in Tech news. Then everyone is suddenly blogging about how controversial, say... Google street maps are. So then I feel almost obligated to say *something* about it too. But there's nothing I hate more than visiting a blog that is just a roll-up of industry news without any original perspective, so I abstain unless I feel like I've got something to add.
2. Don't blog about industry more than once a week.
Industry-related posts are more fun to write when I've had a string of goofy photoshop hacks or local restaurant reviews.Plus, it seems to keep the blog balanced and more personal, without getting too personal (see #3). Mike does this really well.
3. Don't blog about personal life
Egad. I can think of several better ways than a blog to communicate what's going on in your personal life with the people that actually care about those angles. Plus, its tricky to maintain at least some level of privacy and anonymity, so there's little reason to pull a late-30s equivalent of a drunken MySpace page by airing your middle-aged laundry details into the ethersphere.
4. Don't blog anything you wouldn't enjoy reading yourself.
Hey, at least this way, even if you don't have any readers, you can always get a chuckle later by visiting your archives.
5. Try not to end too many posts with smileys.
:-)
(crap.)