If you want to know what my attitude is to posting things here on Brian's Culture Blog, then have a read of this piece by the now rested Rachel Lucas. Her attitude to what to post and when to post is pretty much mine, although days with five rants will be rare here. The equivalent in my case seems now to be very long meandering pieces with very long meandering titles – three proper postings in one, you could say.
Rachel Lucas is particularly good on the "silent reader" phenomenon. The Silent Reader reads, doesn't comment, doesn't email, probably doesn't have his or her own blog, but just has a chuckle or a think, and then gets on with regular life. The (non- because now I'm telling you) secret of blogging, I'm convinced, is to have an imaginary Silent Reader for whom you write, and not to be put off by commenters who to begin with may not be at all what you have in mind. Then what happens is that Silent Readers do in due course assemble who are just like your imaginary Silent Reader, only for real.
A few days or weeks ago, I promised myself that I would ease off on the blogging-about-blogging stuff here, and concentrate on Art, Architecture, Music, etc. Blogging is part of culture, and this is supposed to be my most self-indulgent and anti-anal-retentive blog operation, but I didn't want blogging-about-blogging to get out of control.
But then Adam Reed, an academic who is going around interviewing bloggers, got in touch again, and we had another conversation in which he focussed especially on the exact sort of stuff that I'd been promising myself to write less of. So there you go. As Rachel Lucas says, just put what you want, and people who are interested in that will be interested. That way you'll be content, and will keep going contentedly.
None of the above applies to my Education Blog, where the rule of me having to put something up every week day is working out, so far, really rather well. A little something every day fits in well with education, I find. (That is how to teach maths to children, for example.) My Silent Reader over there likes this rule also.
