I haven’t blogged much lately. I must say that I kept coming back to try and revive this blog but it hasn’t worked until now. The only thing I did regularly was update my wordpress installation every time they released a new version.

WordPress 3.2 was released recently and as I Read Posts and tweets on the web about it and how it has improved (I love the new writing space) I had to come back to upgrade this blog to v3.2 and check it out.

Going through the upgrade process, got me thinking. I was trying to analyse why I am not Blogging as often as I used to (according to the Word Stats plugin, it has been 259 days since my last post – which in itself was just a re-shared photo from flickr.)

I realised that earlier I needed the forum and space this blog provided to express myself and to hear from others through their comments and to interact with friends and strangers from around the world.

Nowadays I still seem to be expressing myself, infact several times a day.

I do this through
my tweets on twitter;
through facebook status updates;
by sharing
articles that interest me,
videos that amused me,
songs that enchanted me;
through facebook places and foursquare check-in updates, which tells the world the kind of places I hang out at and the different people I hang out with;
through flickr and instagram by showing the world the world around me through the lens;
and then there is linkedin
and chatter (at work)
and now google+ is here offering  opportunities +1 of expressing myself.

One has to admit it is not very difficult to express oneself through the above mentioned avenues and more importantly it is not difficult to get almost instant feedback through a like or a +1 or a comment. The world responds to incentives and these sites offer the all important incentives of easy exposure and feedback! I too got sucked into that world, but luckily didn’t let this space die or lose my domain.

One of the main problems with blogging is the Effort it takes.

It takes a lot of effort by the blogger to compose a new blog-post. Firstly one needs to come up with something interesting to write about. Even if it is an idea that pops up suddenly (like this post,) there is some effort involved. Write, revise, check, rewrite, spell-check, add links and images and finally publish.

It also takes quite a bit of effort by the readers. There are tools that make it simpler to aggregate content from multiple blogs, but even then one needs to subscribe to different blogs; read posts that are generally on the longer side (which, in these days of short attention span, is a challenge); pass through some authentication system and captchas in order to be able to post a comment and follow up on the comments regularly. Definitely not as simple as clicking the ‘Like’ button.

Nonetheless, even in this age of Twenty-20, the ODI’s and Test Matches are still watched and loved.

Likewise, there still are a lot of bloggers out there writing and publishing some great stuff – many old timers and several new ones. A lot of blogs that I once followed have become inactive or 404s. It is time I update this list with some new blogs and subscribe and follow them regularly.

I found that as I stopped blogging, I also stopped reading other blogs. Although I don’t promise anything, I am hoping this will get me back on the blogging track and will not be the end of blogging for me!

I’d love to hear from you –

What are your thoughts on blogging and micro-blogging?

Know any blogs that I should check out?

Got a blog yourself?

– please post it all in the comments section!