Every day I get to stare at a blank white rectangle on my computer screen. Every day I stare at that rectangle and wonder how best to fill it. At my disposal are the 26 letters on my keyboard (plus numbers, punctuation and the space bar) which I can arrange in a variety of different orders, some of which might even make sense. Along with the text I could chuck in some weblinks, I could even throw in some pictures, but the space is all mine to fill in any way I choose.
I could...
... write something fantastic and original that will be linked to by websites around the world.
... write something mediocre and ordinary about my life that doesn't even raise one comment.
... write something that gives me personal blog satisfaction.
... copy a chunk of witty text off someone else's site in the hope that everyone thinks I wrote it.
... republish something I wrote on here six months ago in the hope that nobody notices it's a repeat.
... list a lot of other websites that've come up with something much more interesting than anything I could think of.
... write fifteen paragraphs that take all evening to compose.
... write just two lines and then go out and get a life.
... write something with a spelling or grammatical mistake that that people will delight in picking me up on.
... write a load of gibberish khyygrwsvj8gb grcvrdo kjkiuyb 5b'ngrvi9x merely by hitting keys at random.
... write something controversial that ends up getting lots of derogatory comments.
... write something controversial merely to try to get lots of comments, derogatory or otherwise.
... write something cathartic that I've never told anyone else before.
... write something that breaks a confidence, spills a secret and loses a friend.
... write something that causes me to lose me my job. (In fact, if I'd written the wrong thing on here last week I could easily have lost my job and ended up pilloried on the TV news. I didn't, of course.)
... just fill the space by writing something about writing something (although I'd never do that, of course, because it would be cheap and easy).
In short, a blog is a blank canvas ready and waiting each day to be filled by creative content. The only limits here are time and imagination. I reckon the best blogs are those where you never quite know what someone is going to post next, but you know that whatever it is it'll be worth reading. They're the blogs I go back and read to time and time again, anyway. And I like writing my blog because I never quite know what I'm going to write next either.
There you go, that's another daily white rectangle filled. I wonder what I'm going to write tomorrow...
