I came across this from Michael Parsons today. This hardly reflects my experience (so please don’t read this as an expression of my opinion). I found it interesting because there are now more blogs that have been abandoned than are currently active. This may explain why:

“Like all people who rise to the top of their profession, it demonstrates a simple truth: good bloggers work like dogs. You can’t expect readers to show up unless you show up. And the internet never closes. … Every successful blogger I’ve come across is the same. Eat, sleep and drink the work. No time out, no holidays … It takes amazing focus and energy not only to drink from the fire hose of content that is the World Wide Web and make sense of it, but also to direct your own little water pistol back at it and actually get noticed. You need a big ego, a loud voice, and a thick skin.”

Blogging is still an excellent option if you want to push yourself very hard to learn and grow in the content of your choosing. It’s educative, really. Didn’t Augustine say he wrote in order to learn? Blogging lets the expert speak but also forces the amateur (like me) to grow.

In blogging-for-growth, you are not competing against others, you are blogging to learn for yourself. This really takes the pressure off. You’ll be amazed how many blog readers are interested in learning along with you.

As a note, I think in the future group blogs (multiple authors) will probably become more standard (and search engines are more trusting of multi-author blogs). So if you want to blog, find a group of friends.