There used to be a time when I blogged as a form of self expression. Whatever I write is just a form of reflection: by myself, for myself. A personal online diary.
Like many homo sapiens, I wanted to keep a record of my life. My first attempt at doing was so was buying one of those cute plastic pin-codes notebooks as a personal diary, yet I never got myself to write anything in it. Not like I'm lazy or anything, but back in the day, my handwriting was horrendous, and I didn't really like reading my own diary filled with illegible abstract artform.
After so many years, my handwriting hasn't improved. Naturally, I became even more reliant on online blogging. You named it, I've tried it: Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr and now, Posterous. Yet, I never really had the impulse to lock up this supposedly personal domain of mine. That was when I've realised that maybe I do want to be heard. I want my blog to seen, to be read, to be enjoyed.
And with that, in came the tagboards. It was a fad a few years back (died down recently, but I do have friends that are still using them). Each tag I received served as a footprint of self-fulfilment that my blog is being read. To satisfy this goal, I would even call up my friends to visit my blog while reminding them to leave a tag. After all, if your tagboard seems busy, others would think that your blog is awesome, right? Yeah, I was pretty self-centered and shamelessly attention-seeking.
Of course, such needy behaviour was terribly unhealthy. Luckily for me, I did eventually take the tagboards down, but the reason behind it wasn't noble as you think. People simply stopped visiting as they got tired of reading my boring personal life or me ranting about pointless unimportant things. No visitors meants no tags, and no tags meant a dead tagboard which was a massive eyesore. Just like how Rebecca Black used to disable ratings on her embarrassing Friday video, I eventually removed the dead tagboards from my embarassing blogs.
Nothing much happened after that. I kept on blogging, and as I grew up,
my blogging style changed as well. It was never really planned, I just began to write differently. Throughout this process, something shocking happened: people were telling me that they like reading my blog and wished I updated more frequently. It was weird, since I've never really been told that in the past; more importantly, I have terrible grammar, so there must be something redeeming I have unconsciously done for them to willingly suffer the pain from all my stupid typos and crappy sentence structures.
It became apparent that awesome redeeming quality was my changing blog content. Gone were the old rambling and descriptions of my life. If you want to check those out, you can click the last page and start reading from there, you have been warned. Actually, the best way would be for me to give you my old blogger site but there is no way I'm going to do that. Nobody is really interested in your day-to-day event diary, unless:
1) You are some mega pop star.
2) Your friends are stalking you.
3) Your have a SO. Significant other.
Other than that, if you just ramble about how boring your life is, your blog will be dead boring as well. That's why Facebook and Twitter is for anyway. Fortunately, instead of rambling on life in general, I've moved on to rambling on certain topics of life. Apparently, providing my opinion on issues beats simple regurgitation. People want some value in the content they read, and I've slowly come to realise that. As such, I creates a
Tumblr account along side this main blog. While I liked writing about issues, they can be really wordy and more importantly, I can't have the energy to update such a blog all the time. I wasn't ready to give up on posting random cute pictures & videos, posting random quotes and writing random emo stuff.
Now that I know the importance of providing value in my blog content, I will make sure that I continue to do a good job with content that provides value to anyone who reads my blog. :) Have an awesome Christmas everyone, or at least to everyone who celebrates them anyway!
... Wow, what a long post to justify the utter lack of updates on your blog. Geez.
