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Do we blog for passion, or is it pride?

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One tag, yet so powerful in so many ways is the <A> tag found within the old skool language, HTML. It can do a lot of things to a lot of ideas and at the same time can amplify a lone voice to inspire thousands - or - annoy the hell out of thousands.

Last night, I watched Robert Scoble get all juiced up on Wine and give his presentation on Techmeme and how to reverse engineer it. I found it quite a sight to see him do this on camera, number of reasons mainly it showed his motivation around link backs was - for me - all wrong and kind of made me wonder at why I continue to subscribe to him there after. I know why, as at times his signal to noise ratio is ok, and thus I'm happy to donate my eyeballs to his discoveries.

That being said, I've seen many other bloggers obsess over the amount of traffic they get, more importantly whom links to them and how they value their input. I admit at times, I find myself checking out technorati to see whom has linked back to this blog but, more to do with "what reaction did my last post get" (as at times you make a post, wake up the next morning and go - can I have a blog mulligan please?).

This is the commodity we trade with now, and to be linked by TechCrunch, Scoble, Techmeme, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Digg all mean instant blog stardom. This stardom may last 5secs or it could last a month+, either way what truly worries me the most is we've some how formed an informal online geekceleb committee. If they like you, they bestow upon you wealth - if they hate you, fear the wrath that is about to be unloaded upon you.

Is this what we signed up for when we started to blog / build an idea? to have others accept you in a way that generates traffic or is it more to do with getting back to basics and blog for passion instead of pride.

Personally, I'd prefer to keep my traffic low and engage with quality and not quantity as for me that's where the grass roots of why I blog come from. I love to read comments that challenge an idea, as you get to have real dialogue.

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