Sean Reiser

So, I have a confession to make I'm a horrible blogger and I'm rather unrepentant about it. The core issue isn't my lack of proof reading, nor is it my inconsistent posting schedule, there is one reason why I'm a horrible blogger:

I Don't Care If You Read My Blog or Not

I know that might sound odd. It's not that I don't want you to read, I'm just rather apathetic about it. You might be asking why I blog if I'm not interesting in being read. It's a long story.....

Years ago I kept a livejournal it was a bit of silliness. Quite frankly, I don't have an interesting life so journaling it is rather mundane and of interest to very few people. The exercise died on the vine after a little bit.

A few years ago I had some medical issues and it was suggested that I find reasons to read and write more to stimulate parts of the brain. I began blogging here on some tech and geeky things as an excuse to write regularly. My intent was never to have anyone read what I wrote, it was just to write. Once I got into a pattern of doing it, I have to admit that I rather enjoyed it.

I Don't Think Of My Readers When I'm Writing

When I write, I write for me. I never think "readers will find this interesting", I think "ooh, I find this interesting". Many bloggers look at techmeme, twitter's trending topics, digg, reddit, etc to determine what to write about. I go, "ooh, look! Bunny! I'm gonna tell people". I don't care if people want to know about it or not as I expect no one to read it.

Focus May Be A Problem

Because I write for me, not you, I want to write about whatever interests me, whenever it interests me. I'll often post multiple times in a day and then go for a month without posting. This is also why there have been so many experiments such as separating non-geek and photos posts onto a separate domains. The net effect of this was having three rarely updated blogs instead of one site. On my birthday this year I merged my blogs onto http://seanreiser.com. So now I have one schizophrenic blog which is updated frequently more. I was temped to use "Your Home For Tech, Dr Who Silliness, Politics, Baseball and Random Pictures of Flowers and The New York City Skyline" as a tag line. Like a Seinfeld episode this blog is about everything and nothing.

I Should Make a Minor Effort Let People Know I'm Here

Because I don't care if you're anyone reads my stuff, I tend not to promote my blog as I should. I push the content notification via RSS to friendfeed, and twitter. And I syndicate content into Facebook and Livejournal. But that's quite frankly all I usually do. You see, as I expect no one to read what I write, so having a 200 people read an article I've written makes me happy.

If I'm reading an article similar to something I've written I may comment with a link, but I don't do it often enough. If I'm inspired by a post to write something I'll link to the original post but will rarely comment on the original post. I should also be looking for similar articles, making substantial comments and link back to my story.

I never take advantage of the forums I'm active in. When I post articles of interest I should me mentioning them on these forums as the rest of the world seems to do it.

I know these things work. This weekend, for example, I posted a link to something I've written in a comment on webmonkey and I'm seeing a dramatic increase in traffic. Of course I wrote my thing before seeing the webmonkey piece and thought they complemented each other.

Why I Should Care More

Quite frankly I'm looking for either contract or full-time work. If you're on my site and not the places I've syndicated it too, you probably see that there's a hire me button on the menu and a rather fun JS and Flash page curl effect on the upper right hand corner of the site, linking to my Hire Me page. You never now where you'll find a lead, so I should be leveraging everything put in front of me.