The end of term is rapidly approaching, and it’s been gnawing away at the back of my mind that I haven’t updated my blog for a while. It’s not just my blog that’s been stagnating either; my last tweet was on January the 13th. Typically I’ve been thinking about this for several weeks rather than doing something about it.

What I’ve been thinking about are the reasons why I haven’t updated my blog. Partly I think it’s because I’m more inclined to introversion than extroversion. I’m not a natural blogger (if there is such a thing) because my instinct is to keep my thoughts to myself whereas blogging is all about sharing. Although that shouldn’t really apply to this blog, which isn’t about anything difficult or personal, the force of habit can sometimes exert a similar hold over a person as the force of gravity.

I’m also guilty of thinking that a blog post has to be ‘substantial,’ which of course it doesn’t. It has to be relevant and it has to be interesting, but that can easily be achieved in a couple of paragraphs (or 140 characters). Just because my thoughts on a particular subject don’t equate to the length of an essay doesn’t mean that they’re not worth committing to ones and zeroes. And let’s face it, the shorter the post the more likely it is to be read.

I would be less worried about this if I was short of ideas to blog about, but I’m not. Two or three times a week I read an article which I think would make a good starting point for a blog post, only to do nothing about it. Each one of these missed opportunities creates a small mote of self-recriminiation that worries away at me like a stone in a shoe (or like the LoveFilm DVD that’s been in my bag since Monday).

This is all very well, but this blog post has been a pointless exercise unless it’s followed up with another one, and then another one after that. It’s tempting to resolve to blog once or twice a week, but that’s probably not the best way of approaching this. After all, there may be a very boring week where nothing grabs my attention, and blogging for the sake of keeping a promise I wasn’t asked to make isn’t going to benefit anyone.

All I really need to do is make the most of the ideas that occur to me. They won’t all be worth blogging about, but each one will at least be worth thinking about, and the ideas which I think about more than once are probably worth writing about.