My first blog post doesn’t have to be amazing.

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So, I decided I wanted to start a blog, but I’m not sure I have anything really to say. That idea is keeping me from actually writing anything, so I’ve decided to make my first post about why I wanted to start a blog in the first place.

One of the reasons I’m starting this blog now is thanks to the support/peer pressure of a member of one of the chatrooms I participate in, Rasmus Koorits (@rkoorits). He jokingly demanded one of the other members to write a blog about something he just said. He invoked peer pressure stating “I’ll start one if you do!…Carol will too”, and suddenly I was party to a dare to blog.

I had vaguely thought about blogging before, and had set up a WordPress account to blog about a specific project I had in mind, but had never followed through on it. Partly because I didn’t think I had much to say, and partly because I was scared that the project I had in mind would be a failure. Like most people, sometimes I face my fears, and sometimes I run away from them. I’ve run away from this one for a while, and it hasn’t helped, so it’s time to just face it. That’s reason #2, but it’s still not the most powerful one.

For a while, I thought the reason I wanted to start a blog was to share my ideas. Like, maybe someone would find them useful in the same way that they might find the presentation I did at CAST or the poster I did for PNSQC useful. But then one of the other presenters (Gary Miller, @1030omelette) and I were practicing our presentations over Skype, and he reminded me that blogging isn’t just about sharing your own ideas. Instead, it’s about establishing a place to have longer conversations than twitter or IM allows and collecting other people’s ideas and having dialogues and discussions and all those other words that mean conversations with purpose. Good call, Gary.

I guess there are lots of reasons to start blogging. So far this post hasn’t been anywhere near as painful or frightening as I expected. I guess the real question is, why didn’t I think I could do this before?

PS. I totally beat you, Rasmus. 😛 Peer pressure! 😀

Edit: Someone noted in the comments that I didn’t include a link to the presentations I mentioned. Here’s a link to the CAST Presentation, but I don’t have one for the PNSQC Poster.

Edit 2: I added a new page that includes a copy of the the poster called “Things I’ve Done“.