A few days ago, I posted an entry that dealt with people who don't "get" blogging, and always seem to be concerned about how much "time" blogging takes. Their concern, apparently, is that bloggers are some sort of social-rejects, stereotypical loners trapped in their parents' basement, or perhaps internet geeks who do nothing but babble on and on about arcane technical stuff and have no true connection to the "real world." Blah blah blah. I hope that I was able to effectively counter that perception, and now comes another perspective on blogging and time from the Instigator Blog. The title of Ben's post is, "How Much Time Does It Take To Blog?"
The answer, at least for some bloggers (including me), is "how many hours are you awake in a day?" You see, blogging as a hobby (as opposed to a project, or purely social activity, etc) entails always being "on." Always filing away snippets of information, continuously scanning news and headlines, remembering to snap images on cell-phones for later use, finding common threads in disparate news stories, monitoring current events, observing trends, and so on. For some of us, this sort of behavior has always been part of our nature; with blogging, we now have an outlet, a place, in which to consolidate these things.
So in that sense, it's very true: although the actual act of typing a blog entry (like this one) usually only takes a few minutes, the actual process of thinking about how to blog a particular event or story, and crafting and editing the entry in your head throughout the course of any given day, and accumulating data (links, pictures, etc) for the entry are never-ending. It's just how we go about our daily life. We are bloggers.
