Doing Blogging the hard way or the easy way?

To break out a little from my normal technology discussion, I am thinking right now about how others generate traffic.  Am I right to generate my own material or should I utilize other people’s videos and so forth?  Many of my teammates are generating very high numbers utilizing short snippets, often by people other than themselves.  I respect these teammates, and I think that they are doing a great job.

Which brings me to think that my own exploration in blogging has been ego centric in that I blog about what I am thinking about or exploring, not what to generate audience numbers.  After all these blogs are generally an on the job hobby, instead of writing “best practices” or other documentations, I write the explorations into my several blogs.

My question is this: Should I focus on getting numbers or should I focus on writing and hope the audience that is reading my material appreciate it for the stream of consciousness that it is? 

Actually it isn’t really a stream of consciousness, because if it was there would be all of those random sexual thoughts that I assume healthy males get, and then there would be the worries about my 401K, the health of my wife, mother, sister, dog and birds.  Getting the oil changed in the car, how fortunate I am to own a car, condo with a nice view, have a job at Microsoft.  Or it would include my thoughts about God, religion, the Star Trek movie, wondering whether I should waste the brain cells on going to see “Land Of the Lost”.  Programming my PIC project I am currently preparing for Christmas 2009.

See, stream of consciousnees can be fun for a paragraph, but how do some of these people do it all of the time, it would be boring to read, after all how many of you have read James Joyce “Ulysses”?  Uggh, every once in awhile I will pick up the copy my wife has kept from college and try to read it (“Ulysses”), I don’t get it.  The book “Ulysses” was contraband in the US till 1933, proving that things that are forbidden are more attractive than things you can get easily.  Somehow I doubt if any liberal arts student has actually read Ulysses for pleasure. 

I would rather spend my time reading Feynman’s lectures or Bohr’s textbook on Thermodynamics.

 

Well back to the Microsoft Research exploration in the next blog.  Which I consider the easy way to blog.