This image was shamelessly taken from Michael Heilemann’s Binary Bonsai and used here, because I didn’t bring a digital camera. Sorry Michael.
This weekend I met up with Joen, Michael and Matt in Nyhavn.
Unfortunately I had to leave after only 2 hours, but what I was left with (apart from the feeling that Matt is pleasant person to be around) was a feeling that I am not a blogger at all.
Sure I have my own little virtual soapbox from whence I spew forth my gall and buffoonery, but I am not a real blogger.
Bloggers have Flickr Pro accounts and announce Flickr tags for your meeting.
They actually use all technoratis features.
They bookmark things with del.icio.us.
They know more names of bloggers and apparently well known blogs than I would have time to read in a week.
For short, they are very much into the community aspect of blogging.
I have always liked the community aspect being there, but it has never been a large part of it for me.
Websites that have community aspects to them are always hopelessly underutilized by me. I sign up and forget all about them.
The reason why there even is a community aspect to my blogging is because of my friends. I started reading their blogs.
So it wasn’t so much that the blogging was the community, as it just being a reflection of an already existing community, namely my circle of friends.
This changed a bit when I started reading blogs of people who were friends of friends, like Bjørn and Michael, but it was still born out of real world relations.
I quite like the purely virtual community aspect of it, especially since it bleeds into real life, which saturdays meeting was an example of.
But I feel like it’s something that might take quite a bit of time to maintain.
Not a lot of time at once, but a bit of time, all the time.
And that’s something I am apparently really bad at.
I think it’s because I am wildly unstable in the way I dedicate time for voluntary activities.
I might spend 100 hours one week on the community thing, and suddenly I have no time to spend for 6 months.
A good example of this is my appearance on the WordPress scene. I started by writing 4 plugins and a ton of emails to the WP hackers mailing list. Then I disappeared for half a year. I am slowly toeing back in, but I don’t see myself having time to go full force again any time soon.
Another example is this blog.
That said, I still went home and finally created a del.icio.us account.
And I am still considering that Flickr Pro account.