Darren Barefoot posed this question in advance of his discussion at Northern Voice, a blogging conference I attended this weekend in Vancouver, BC.

He expected a few hundred replies to his online survey. He got over a thousand, answering questions like “Why Did You Start Blogging?” and the inevitable for many, “Why Did You Stop Blogging?”

For my own answers, I confess I’ve had a number of blogs over the past few years, all of them personal (until Brave New Traveler).

Aside from my obvious interest in technology and writing, I felt blogging was a way to share my thoughts on various topics, from movies, to news, to politics - basically blogging whatever was on my mind.

I kept these blogs up with relative frequency and minimal readers (like the majority of other blogs on the web). But I made myself a promise: I would stop blogging the day I realized I had nothing to say.

Who Has Anything To Say?

Granted, the definition of saying something with “meaning” depends very much upon your audience. The blogger can only put out what they believe has value. The readers decide what’s valuable to themselves.

Some bloggers, of course, don’t care if they have 1 reader or 1000. Blogging for them isn’t about “spreading their thoughts” into cyberspace, it’s more a personal diary that allows them to back-up their brain, practice their writing, or any number of other motivations.

Darren told a great story about how he worked for a few summers at the Victoria information office helping tourists decide how to spend their vacation. They would ask him, “What’s there to do here?” to which he would be forced to list off a number of choices until one caught their interest.

It wasn’t until months later that Darren finally gave up and asked the tourists a question of his own: “Why did you come here?”

If they didn’t know the answer to that, they had no business being in Victoria.

An Open Discussion

And so, I thought I would pose this question to all of Brave New Traveler’s readers, many who author blogs of their own.

Why do you blog?

Whether you write a personal blog, travel blog, business blog, art blog, or any blog at all — please introduce yourself, your blog, and share your answers in the comments below. Thanks!

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Ian MacKenzie

Ian MacKenzie is the founder and editor of Brave New Traveler. Aside from writing, he spends his time exploring the fundamental nature of existence and wishing he did more backpacking.