In the wake of my previous entry, where I revealed my snarkiness about shallow pointless content, it’s got me thinking about what I write here, and what other people choose to write about in their blogs/journals/columns/whatever. I find myself asking, Is it sometimes good to annoy people, perhaps even just for the sake of it?

My standard response to this kind of question has always been "of course not!" since I have always loathed the way utter pricks rationalize their behaviour by saying "that’s just how I roll… deal with it!" and imply that life would be so much more boring without them around to shake things up a bit. But then I realized there are other people in the world who also frequently offend others, and yet I feel that life would be much less interesting without them– It isn’t all just black and white.

I’ve been blogging a long time now (more than five years) and it seems like I’ve managed to avoid two things:

Could these two things be related? Should I be more politically outspoken, or perhaps start a fight with some prominent blogger to drive my traffic up?* Do I even want more traffic here? Currently I have about 120 fresh visitors per day, and when all the RSS stuff is taken into account as well I can probably expect any given entry to by read by 200-300 people, many of whom will be regulars. That seems very respectable to me, but one thing I can’t help noting is that these numbers have been very static over the last year. I am not reaching many new people, and I find myself wondering if perhaps I want to.

It sounds vain I know, but when I think about it honestly I think the answer to that question (do I want to reach more people) is YES. Because as a human being I want people to care what I think, to listen to me, and perhaps sometimes be influenced by me. The only people in this world who don’t care what people think of them are sociopaths, and I’m glad not to be one of those.

Regardless of whether it is good (or very possibly bad) for traffic, when I look back at what I’ve written here in years to come I’d like to know what I was really thinking, not just what I was comfortable chatting about. To date I have tended to avoid causing offense wherever possible, but sometimes this means I self-censor perhaps a tad more than I would if this was, say, an anonymous journal.

I am an actor and this is my stage; I am a painter and this is my canvas… you get the idea. I don’t want to be bored by my own blog. And ultimately it is my blog, not something I am forcing people to read. Emailing someone to tell them that their favorite band sucks is an incredibly obnoxious thing to do, but to blog publicly about the particular shortcomings of the same execrable band is entirely reasonable.

So… it’s no more Mr Bland Guy. I am going to indulge in a little less self-editing than usual, and thus possibly irritate or offend people occasionally– and I’m not going to beat myself up about it.

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* Any volunteers?