State Of My BLOG

Image via WikipediaOne of the things that makes writing this BLOG tough is balancing a lot of competing needs and interests.

I write here to help me keep my hand and head in the business and technology world and because I like to think try to understand stuff and write about it.

One thing that makes the whole operation tricky is I'd also like to work in that larger world some day and I worry sometimes about offending a company I might want to work for. I don't generally pull my punches, but there are times when I probably spend a bit too much time thinking about how to phrase something in a way that will be descriptive but innocuous. Taking that approach has a tendency to produce prose that is stilted and bland.

On the flip side, I don't want to be snarky. I know that sells but it doesn't feel right to me. A little humor or sarcasm every once in awhile is OK but I don't see any merit in being some sort of Internet bully.

I don't write for money or fame but I'd be lying if I said I didn't write for recognition. That's one of those basic human drives that we're all hard wired for.

Occasionally I've written about some very esoteric topics. I used to do this without a second thought but as my page views have increased over the past few months I'm starting to have second thoughts. Does anyone really want to hear my half baked ruminations on the future of high performance computing?

Now that I'm on a pretty good positive growth curve do I really want to keep stepping out of the box? Knowing who your audience is and catering to their needs, desires and interests isn't optional if you want to see continued growth.

Which leads to my big question right now. Do I want to see continued growth? I've set myself some fairly aggressive goals for this BLOG over the past few months in terms of readership and so far I've been able to meet them. I haven't set a new goal for this month and the main reason is that I want to figure out where I'm going with this thing. Setting a page view goal pretty much answers that question.

Finally there is the thought that some day I might be looking for a job or a potential business partner. Odds are good that this BLOG will be one of the things they'll examine while working their way through to a decision.  What if they read something that they consider to be sub par or disagree with? I should probably pretend that I wouldn't care but the truth is I would. I work with a great bunch of people and have excellent management but I don't want to be doing what I'm doing today for the rest of my professional life. The thought that I might lose an interesting and potentially life changing opportunity because I happen to do a poor job of explaining a point I'm making or express a controversial perspective is a sobering one.

But I believe life should be about taking risks. When you do that you risk failure. That's a little scary but I'm OK with it. The world is a constantly changing place and right now that is more true than it's ever been in my experience.

Change comes whether we like it or not. We're all running with the bulls; we can ignore this and hope we don't get gored or participate and work towards something better.