Nicole Stockdale, who’s been blogging up a storm of late, linked to a blogger who’s calling it quits. The guy’s complaint is that blogging takes too much time to do well — a reasonable point — but also gets into that “tree falling in a forest” argument, concluding there’s no point writing if there are no readers, which strikes me as specious.
If writing is an art, and artists create for themselves, why does it matter if anybody sees it? What the guy really means is that his blog is available to the whole wide world but only a couple dozen people are seeing it, and this makes him feel small and his efforts seem pointless.
It’s tempting to read meaning into to numbers, to presume a bigger audience is preferable to a small one, to conclude we can measure our success by counting eyeballs. Yet inside we know the numbers are good for one thing: turning a buck. It there’s no plunder to be had, the numbers mean squat.
And if you’re not doing it for money, you’re doing it for something that can’t be measured, so why get hung up on what the yardstick says?
If you can’t spare the time to blog, then, sure, give it up. But if you’re thinking of quitting because everybody else is reading the InstaPundit, well, find a better excuse.
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