This Monday evening I’ll be meeting with Paul Teusner about his PhD work on Emerging Church bloggers (apparently I count 
) and their impact on the churches they are a part of, etc. So because I’m the sort of person who instinctively pre-empts the sort of questions I’m likely to get, and also because the blog has been going through a little bit of a dry patch (December had the least posts in it for any month for ages), I’ve been contemplating why I blog, and what I believe I’m contributing to the wider blogosphere. I’ve probably done this before, but here it is: my deeply introspective (like most of my posts) blogging manifesto.
I blog because I like writing
I love having an outlet to write, and to then have people reading what I write. I can still remember vividly the first time I had someone comment on the blog who I hadn’t personally mentioned the blog to, and it was at that moment when I realised that I wanted to give this blogging thing some level of commitment. As someone who gets very excited by good ideas and concepts, I love having the place to articulate those concepts myself, and to interpret those ideas into my contextual environment. And I like having somewhere to use words like “contextual” without sounding like a pompous git.
In many ways the blog has become a lot like my lounge room, late at night over coffee – the chance to discuss the really deep things that you can’t have a go at any other time. Lots of the things that I now put onto TheGeoffRe(y)port are the little things that would normally just get scribbled down in notebooks that never get looked at again, or conversations that would gradually fade into distant memories. There’s something really fun and exciting about putting those thoughts out there, letting others weigh into discussions they would otherwise have never found out about. Which is an other of the key reasons why I blog:
I blog because it stimulates discussion
It’s taken a fair bit to have this part of the blog really up and going, but I think I’ve now got my writing style, and readership up to a point where it is very possible to engage in really genuine discussions with friends and strangers to change the way that we think. And if not completely change it, then at least cause a reconsideration. One of the best parts of blogging last year was seeing some of the conversations just get completely out of control (and usually a long way away from where I’d started them). It’s been such a pleasure to see the ideas that have just completely thrown me, proven me wrong, or even just helped me to understand why I might be right. It’s almost becoming a catchphrase for me that “I think that I’m probably wrong, but I want to understand why”.
And completely separately from just the online conversations, it’s become a semi-regular occurrence for conversations in the “real world” to begin with the line “I was just reading your blog the other day and…”, which is always a good bit of fun. The blog has become a part of my life, and a small part of other peoples lives. It’s almost (in a micro kind of way) building community. Which is kind of fun.
I blog because I read blogs
Lots of them. My subscription list in Google Reader tends to hang around about 100 – and it is almost impossible to read those without wanting to contribute to the discussion in a meaningful way. I love reading an insightful comment on a blog (my own or someone else’s) and then clicking on their name to find a whole new exciting blog to explore. And in some ways if I’m not able to do that for other people, have them check out what I’m on about, it’d feel a bit fraudulent.
And when I discover something exciting in the blogosphere, I want to have somewhere to share it. It’s that feeling of being enchanted by an idea, and needing to have someone to tell about it. There’s a part of me that just jumps at any opportunity to do that.
I blog because people are reading it
I love hearing that someone’s read what I’ve written and been challenged, or had a laugh, or caught up on the latest Richmond news, or just about anything. There is undoubtedly something deeply self aggrandising about blogging (particularly the way I do it), and I’m one of those people who checks his technorati ranking, and the number of hits and all of those things a lot more regularly than I ought. But I’m having fun doing it, and it does feel like there’s a contribution being made to the wider blogosphere.
There’s probably even other reasons that I blog as well – but these have been the main ones. I think that the key for me is that blogging has in many ways been really positive for my relationship with God – it’s helping me to really consider my motives, and forcing me to put more action behind my big ideas. Hopefully, I’ll be able to keep it going for a little bit longer yet. 