So, I was reading this article on my phone which doesn’t render plain text very well so I wasn’t really paying much attention. But then I noticed it was talking about TODO lists and plain text. This piqued my interest so I read it. To say this article will change my life would a massive overstatement but there were a couple of points in it that made me think “aha!”. And then I did a facepalm. The first point I will save for a later post, the second point, and the focus of this blog post, was about private blogs. And this got me thinking about blogging and who my target audience is.

I’ve had blog for quite a while (my first blog post was published on 2006/08/13) but I never blog. And I realised it was because I always blogged for others. I now realise this is silly. I’m not an expert in my field, I’m not doing something specialised, indeed I’m probably not doing anything terribly interesting, I just write about stuff that interests me, annoys me or things I think are of note and really the only person I’m writing for is me. It’s not that I don’t care about people reading any of my posts, I do, it’s just they are not the target audience.

You see, it’s about motivation: if I think I have to write an interesting article because I want someone else to read it and think “um, that was interesting” then I’m probably on a hiding to nowhere. Whereas if I think I’ll write something I find interesting I might stand a small chance of succeeding and, most importantly, I might actually write it.

It’s not about the reading it’s about the writing and that is a huge thing for me.