I know I use Rolling Doughnut as a pulpit for a wide range of topics, and not all of these are interesting to the same people. I think about that, but when I blog, I aim for this advice, which Wil Wheaton summarizes today:
Back in the days when Tony Pierce wasn’t spending his time trolling his own commenters and generating controversy for the sake of building page views, he wrote a fantastic post about avoiding blogging burn out, which was something we were all talking about in those days when we were all sort of defining what blogging was and wasn’t, making it up as we went along (but not admitting that we were.) I forget exactly what the advice was (and it’s all massively awesome advice that should be required reading for everyone — including Tony, today — who aspires to do more than talk about their cats with their blog) but it can be distilled down to a couple of things: write what you want to, write what’s on your mind, and don’t worry about who is reading it. It’s such simple and logical advice, but clearly isn’t easy to absorb and put into practice, because I need to remind myself about it at least twice a year. I used to worry a lot about wasting people’s time with my blog, but now I save that obsessing for my books.
The italicized advice is how I think about what I write. On this path, I’m never going to be the top blogger who gets thousands of hits per day. I realize that’s solely an “indictment” of my interests and (lack of) focus rather than a claim that the most popular bloggers are somehow focused on the wrong things or worse, are selling out. Hammering away at circumcision doesn’t help, either. In general, but at least on that, I hope I can educate someone who hasn’t considered it from an ethical/logical approach. If so, wonderful. If not, so be it.