I have always wanted to restart a blog but had difficulty deciding on its theme, its purpose, what type of audience I would like to attract to my blog, or how I am going to sustain it in the long run (this is, for the most parts, my biggest concern).
I have seen blogs come and go during my lifetime in cyberspace, its sudden rise post-9/11 resulting from the gaps in the news on the reporting of the said event, and how citizen journalism rose from that end, and its quick and sudden decline resulting in part from the 140-character byte-size revolution so called Twitter. Some of these blogs went on to become a medium for advertising either as a place where Internet advertisers are able to embed their banners or even some of them showing pictures of the bloggers modelling products on sale in the very same blogs. While it's not a bad thing, understandably, I wanted to have some kind of direction in this blog.
Do I want to start a blog about my interests? If yes, which one? Am I in it to fulfill the need of a specialized group of audience, or a large homogeneous one, or perhaps a niche audience? Or do I really want to use this blog to pursue a greater good of something? Maybe something related to my professional working life... but having just let that thought out of my mind and into this blog, maybe not the professional life. I have enough hours of work in a day, why should I still be using my free time to talk about work? If I was self-employed or even a business owner, then I believe it's reasonable enough for me to talk shop all day long (Note: a good gauge of whether you are talking too much about your own business or work is when you friends stop meeting you up because you are too involved with your own work to the extent of losing conversation pieces with people). To bring the topic back, I have spent enough hours at work so using a blog to expand my work is not ideal. I'm not too sure I want to make this into a diary blog as well. I don't particularly fancy telling the whole world what sort of day I went through, or what food I ate with whom and et cetera. Apart from the obvious concern of opening my life out to public scrutiny, I am hard-pressed to see the need for it.
Maybe starting this blog will be therapeutic for me. As my (potential) reader or a follower of this blog, please bear in mind that I am under no obligation to write an entry every day, or every other day for that matter. But do drop by here as and when you feel like it. I am still not sure of the theme and direction of this blog but since it's 2015, it's a good time to start something new. Since blogs don't need an ending like some good books or movies, I am not pressured to finish what I am starting today. When I don't have the time, I just won't write. When I want to post something but don't have the words, then maybe I'll make room to upload some pictures. And when I'm running on empty, then that's what it'll be: empty.
But I hope this blog stays as long as it can. I had one diary blog in the past. There were some brilliant posts (if I should say so myself) that were feature-styled and drew some decent crowd despite the lack of advertising on my blog, and some personal ones which were cringe-worthy if I were to ever revisit that blog post again. So hopefully this one will work despite the proliferation of blogs and the audiences' tiredness and selectivity of these blogs.
Fingers crossed.
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