Blogging Changes Everything

Blogging is a tricky business.  Those who have never written a blog, or anything for public consumption, have no idea what it is like to have a readership.

To be sure, when I started this blog, I had no idea that one day it would receive some 120 visitors per day.  I would have been surprised if it had received 10 -- as I thought I was writing a set of tips that would help someone moving back to Jamaica, and that they would find it useful if they ever did a search for basic information.

Blogging, or the act of writing a public diary, changes everything about what is written, the tone of it, the level of self-disclosure and the risk that something written will come back in some form to haunt or harm.  I always found private writing to be a boring chore, and just could not keep up the discipline, as I could never figure out why I should continue after some point.

This blog, however, is a bit unique in the subject matter I write about, and whenever I write I realize that there are possibilities that arise when I write, such as:

-- future children, friends and family will have a record of some of my thinking that probably will last forever on the internet

-- people could find it useful for years to come

-- after I die, a little bit of me might continue long after

The most that could happen with a private diary is that it be discovered and read by one or two people.  That's not too much of an event.

However, my stats tell me that thousands of people around the world have read my blog, and this is just a little bit sobering.