"MY LIFE AS A BLOGGER"

Forbes's Rich Karlgaard had a good piece in last week's print edition on his new life as a blogger. Check it out:

I've been writing a daily weblog on Forbes.com for two months now. This crazy assignment has forced two changes.

Though a die-hard West Coaster, I now must keep an East Coast schedule. I get up at 4:30, pour hot water and four Irish tea bags into a soup-bowl-size mug and sit down at my home-office Dell. Some mornings I don my Bose headset to shut out barks from Dakota, our dog, who's aroused by my predawn noises.

The other change has been a full-dunk immersion (as my Baptist minister might put it) into the blogosphere. This new medium is larger than the Pacific Ocean and growing by the day.

Here's what I've learned:

• Blogging is not overhyped. You may be forgiven for thinking so, as no day goes by without a story on blogs. But blogs are no fad. They are cheap and easy to do. And blogs fulfill that deepest of human needs as defined by psychologist Abraham Maslow: self-actualization. People write blogs because they want to know themselves and want to be known by others and because they want their lives to count. When a communications medium is both riding the Moore's Law cost-capability curve and tapping into a deep need, it's no fad.

• Don't judge blogging by the "average" blog. The average blog is amateurish, just as the average crooner is no American Idol. The law of large numbers guarantees that. How many blogs are out there? Maybe millions. Soon billions. This means, of course, that the vast majority of blogs will be of no interest to you or me. Even a 95th-percentile blog--judged by its quality--has little chance of making it into our busy reading schedules. But don't judge the blogosphere by the average quality. At the top of this huge pyramid are thousands of readable and useful blogs.

Think of the blogosphere as a bookstore where no book is refused. A store bigger than the Mall of America. (Ocean, pyramid, bookstore ... too many metaphors, I know.) (full article)