I just realized something. I started blogging because I was going to stop sending links to people. I was going to blog the links instead. This provided me with instant archiving, and the ability to just post the links and let all my friends access them when they desired. AIM crashes? No problem! Just look up the links on the blog.

Today, I have sent Josh four links, mostly culled from other blogs (directly or indirectly). None of them have been posted here. On the other hand, in the month of February, I have written about hating one of my profs, about nonviolent conflict, and about books I’m reading.

I was reading Volokh today and saw the link to Blogopoly. Following it, I proceeded to open the links to Broadway (USS Clueless) and Park Place (Dean’s World), as well as to Luxury Tax, which was the TTLB Blog Ecosystem.

I’ll start in the middle. Dean’s World led me to campaign commercials at IMAO. I summarily sent this last link to Josh. Nothing else came of this.

More relevant to my real purpose here was the top posting on USS Clueless, about blogger burnout. He’s taking a hiatus, but the first part of the entry deals with the two different types of bloggers, which he calls editors and writers. (He goes into a lot more detail here, look toward the middle.) The editors mostly deal in links with small amounts of description, with the canonical example being InstaPundit. Writers, on the other hand, tend to put miniature essays in their blogs. It’s a lot harder in many ways to be a writer; writers stick their reputations out on every post and have to produce a greater amount of original content. Okay, so far, so good.

Okay, so it seems the same day that Clueless takes a break, TTLB decides to return to his (her? anonymity can be annoying) core and focus on blogging. Interesting.

So. I intended to go into the blogging hobby as a linker–I intended to be posting interesting things that I come across, with a small amount of comment. However, that didn’t work for very long. I don’t have the time to produce the sort of editing output that’s worthwhile, and what I did grab was typically only two degrees of separation, at the most, from The Volokh Conspiracy. There is little point in that. So I’ve changed. Over the past year, my posts have gotten longer. I’ve put more thought into them (generally speaking). Now, I write. Not about any one subject, but about all sorts of different things, usually inspired by something here at Tech or just reporting on the books I’m reading.

I know I only have a couple of readers. I don’t know who you are (except for Josh, and I could venture a few other guesses), but thanks for reading. Hopefully, with time I’ll be more consistently interesting. For me, writing is always an experiment, since it is not my strongest ability. That’s why I did NaNoWriMo, that’s why I started writing at e2, and that’s why I continue this blog, even if it’s not why I started it. It turns out that writing is more important to me than even I thought. The only way to get better, of course, is to practice.