Does anyone read blogs?

BTW, I do indeed like the "occasional essay" approach--and especially having some reviewing and filtering. The #1 problem of the web these days (any entrepreneurs reading?) is signal-to-noise ratio.

I hate to self-promote like this, but seeing as how I run a startup (in profile) dedicated to helping bloggers find stuff to write about and "cure writer's block" (our little slogan), I figure I should say something.

Yes, you should definitely, definitely start a blog. If you're comfortable with it, I'd say get firstnamelastname.com. I got paulstamatiou.com four years ago and have been writing on it consistently since then and I kept it professional and devoid of too many personal things. I talked about stuff that interested me (technology) and often lots of little guides showing how I was able to do this or that. A lot of my posts have just been about things I've been working with over the last few days. New piece of software that I find really handy.. blog post, but I try to add info that others wouldnt have.. tips on how to use that, or getting it setup quickly etc.

Over the years my subscriber numbers slowly went up and now I have a decent following. It's still more or less "professional" in terms of the content I put up there and it has ended up being a portfolio of sorts for myself. Was it worth it? DEFINITELY. It got me a Yahoo internship in California (and several other job offers), I've been flown around to check out various events for different companies, got invited to speak at a conference in Europe (and expenses paid), and I was even in a Nike commercial as they found me online as a "real" user of Nike Plus. Again, I dont want to make this like I'm tooting my own horn... just trying to say that you need to start a blog!

only reason why you might not want to start a blog:

*you dont think you would be able to write consistently

The only thing worse than not having a blog IMO is having one that hasn't been updated in weeks or months.

I could go on and on but I'll just point you to my HN profile where you can email me. :-)

I have been going to a lot of meetups in the Social Space (Facebook, Myspace, Web Startup's etc) as my side projects/interests lie in the same area. In the process of these meetup's I have learnt a lot and seen a couple of good demos. So, I started to blog about those events or the demos that I see there for everyone else's. After any meetup, I typically have a descent number of topics to write about.

The primary reason for me to start a blog was to get better in writing skills and convert the thought process to text that fellow reader can comprehend. I am not really looking to make any money via blogging at least in the near future.

Another theme I have seen is that a couple of people write on funny incidents that happened to them during the day or weekend. It could be a funny/embarrassing incident, but they do a great job of expressing it that even strangers will find it amusing to read it.

Edit: In the process I also opened a twitter account (@socialapp) to see if I would be able to promote my blog. It's been a descent passive experiment as well =)