Audience
One of the reasons I struggle with writing a blog, is the idea of audience. When I write in my personal journal, I know that my audience is me. (Except in the unlikely scenario where Mark picks it up and reads it - luckily I’m very boring…) The challenge with a blog, no matter how much I know that my audience is really just me, myself and I (and, yes, we can be a narcissistic bunch), there is the idea that maybe, possibly, in some outer realm of probability someone else is reading this stuff. So I find myself censoring. “What if my dentist reads this?” I think, and erase the snarky comment about dental drills. “What if I need to get a job in the coffee industry” and out goes the aside about Starbucks. It got even scarier on the days leading up to Tuesday this week, because that was the day I was presenting my layout/design to the class. Yes, it was going to be on an overhead projector with very little visible (the projector isn’t big like my iMac…). But what if someone actually read what I wrote in the three minutes it was up on the screen? And then of course, in the days leading up to the presentation, I sent the URL out to several of my friends, relatives, and colleagues. Luckily, most of them are too busy to come back after the initial “follow Jenn’s link so she won’t be mad at me” impulse. But ultimately it comes down to this. For me, writing this blog is a personal exercise. It’s just that putting it on the Web makes me hope that someone is reading it, someone is finding it not boring, some one is (dare I ask it?) laughing at my jokes. I’m trying not to care about whether anyone other than the three of us are reading it. I’m pretty sure Mark never opens it, and he’s the only one I would think might. But I don’t write about PC games or Windows hardware, so he’s not likely to arrive. The best thing about writing for myself, is that I don’t get mad when I don’t post a new picture or excerpt for a while. I just post when I feel like it.