Where's the content?

Having recently added a sitecounter to my blog, I notice that most people who come across this blog tend not to linger here very long. Indeed some stay for such a short amount of time that the stats report of my sitecounter often shows the time as 0:00. Oops!

The explanation is probably not difficult to find, however. A blog is supposed to be an act of self-expression and yet there's hardly any content here. And even when I do make postings, they are often very short on actual writing: e.g., a list of books I want to buy or books I might possibly be interested in buying, etc.

Plus there's been absolutely no ranting, raving, gripings or even the slightest words on the politics of the day, despite the preponderance of political, left-leaning blogs in my blogroll. Evidently I like to read about politics, but don't have much to say about it.

Well, this blog is still very much a work-in-progress. As self-expression, it is the blog as a whole, with all its links and doodads, that expresses who I am or at least how I want to be perceived. I've spent most of my time with this blog adding links to sites I care about or find interesting, adding more blogs to my blogroll, adding things like my flickr badge (I've been uploading a lot lately, now that I have a pro account), and other infrastructure changes and template tweaks.

Long before I began blogging and discovered things like technorati, del.icious, flickr, or furl, I did a lot of solitary and passive "poor-man's furling" by simply saving an emailed copy of an article I found interesting in the New York Times, or the Boston Globe, or Slate, or Salon, or MSNBC, or some political blog. Now that I have a furl account I can do it online, publicly (for anybody who cares to read my blog and look at my furl feed, etc.), and in a way that is a big part of my "blogging" these days: indeed, Amy Gahran, in 10 Cool Things to do with Furl, described it this way:

Rudimentary blogging: Many blogs are little more than link filters. That is, the authors mainly link to relevant items, perhaps with a short comment, rather than write article-style entries. If that’s all you want to do with your blog, why not just create and syndicate a Furl archive instead?

And that's pretty much what I'm doing. You can see it in my "recently furled" links near the bottom of the sidebar and under "narcissism" in my blogroll as "Furl - the JJMG archive". Anyway, I'll eventually finish puttering around with infrastructure, adding links I want to be associated with, books I'm reading or have read or want to read, etc., and will hopefully actually start saying something — maybe even something worth reading. Hopefully I'll get the hang of this and will find my own voice. Either that or I'll just keep reading what someone else has said about politics or books or whatever, furling what I find interesting or posting links to del.icio.us. Eh, either way.


Categories: blogging, bloggingaboutblogging, blogs, writing, selfexpression, furl, del.icio.us, technorati, byjjmg