Steve Pavlina is currently talking about why certain bloggers succeed, while others don’t. He doesn’t have much novel to say. Basically displicine, hard work and the obstinate urge to keep going. I admire bloggers like Damien Mulley for the sheer amount of time they dedicate and for consistently coming up with novel ideas. To do properly it can be a full time job.

I’m typing this before I go to work. Today I’m going to an academic writing workshop hosted by the LEARN education research network in DCU. I’m bringing something I hope to fashion into a book chapter on how Mathematics can be thaught online. Let’s hope its up to scratch. It’s scary to put your writing out there and have someone pore over it. Particularly half finished. Even a colleague’s proof-read can be hard to take. In a way blogging is like this. Anxiety can easily get in the way and you can end up not writing anything at all.

Perhaps blogging is the distillation of writing by the information age. No time to review or revise. Just get it out there asap. There is nowhere to hide with this kind of writing. The peer review will be relentless but there is no draft. Everything is publication copy. Blogging is about honesty because there’s not enough time to come up with plausible fictions. The best bloggers will not necessarily be the ones that try the hardest, but those that are most honest.