Does anyone read blogs?

I write a blog that's precisely of the sort that you think can't be interesting to others. Random thoughts about anything that interests me; rants, arguments, (rarely) mini-essays on anything in a long list of my interests. Very eclectic.

It's extremely popular, with readership in five figures, and typically more than a hundred daily comments on various posts. One of the best things about it is that it has many readers who are smarter than me, and/or more knowledgeable than me on just about any given topic I'm interested in. I've made a few really good friends and a lot of friendly acquaintances through the blog, all over the world.

Maybe my case is a rare exception; that wouldn't surprise me. I've tried, for example, to write the same kind of eclectic random-thoughts blog in English -- my primary blog is in Russian -- for a few years, and never got more than 100-200 readers. Maybe I wasn't giving it enough attention (it's semi-dormant now, though I'm trying to find tuits to revive it), or maybe in English, a non-specialized blog has a harder time attracting attention. Or maybe much of it is random. Among the blogs I read (40+ in English, a few hundreds in Russian), most widely-read ones are either by famous people or specialized to some topic; but there are some exceptions like me.

I subscribe to many blogs that cover my technical interests and a few personal ones. I avoid blogs with adverts or that are set up to make money. I generally use an RSS reader to follow these blogs (and Twitter and other sources).

I like the idea of writing to sort out my thoughts. I've been doing this for years in email with a couple friends. We've sent about 15,000 emails back and forth so far. Writing those brainstorming emails happens naturally because I know who I'm writing for. I know what they care about and how they think, and I see ways to move their minds in ways they'd find enjoyable.

What I mean by "a purpose" is to affect an audience somehow. I don't normally write "for myself". Writing, at least the way I experience it, is translation: here's how the reader currently understands things, here's some content, now invent a way to make that content comprehensible in terms of that way of understanding. Of course, doing this translation leads to improved insight into the subject matter, just as writing a program leads to improved insight into the problem domain.

I'm currently doing a "Does God Exist?" series of posts because, well, the argument interests me. So I took a bunch of books on all sides of the issue and am going through each of them, writing a quick review as I complete each book (along with a recap)

I've found that the act of making yourself physically write something on paper makes you remember better. This effect is amplified if you're trying to explain it to somebody else in an essay. So the blog is kind of a mind "power tool", enabling me to sort through tons of debate and get to the few arguments and insights that matter to me. On top of that, it'll be around next year when I've forgotten a lot of the detail, keeping the "good parts" near the top of my cognitive heap. (not stack)

Have you checked out PG's site? Rather than a blog, it's an (occasionally) updated set of essays and thoughts. They are usually reviewed by several people before publication (so are higher quality than blog posts), and most of them have a specific point or question which is explored in some detail.

Benefits to this approach are the lack of a dated timeline of posts (so no urge to write because "it's been a week already"), and you only write when a particular issue strikes your fancy.

A negative of this approach (for PG this is less of an issue) is that it is difficult to gain a readership this way, as there is no regular "feed" of content coming from you. If anything is true about online readers, it's that they like to be fed.