I think that a friend of mine is having a crisis of blog existentialism regarding essentially throwing thoughts out into empty space and hearing nothing in return.

Maybe I’m only one of five readers there, as he alleges (which I can easily disprove; Google Reader alone shows twelve people follow his blog), but I do cop quite a bit of value from his posts just because it’s so different than most of the things I read. Maybe it just has to do with the fact I think he’s a cool guy.

But I see his point. I deal with the same thing. On my own blog, I feel like I’m putting messages into bottles and setting them out in the ocean. I’ve struggled with maintaining a writing routine lately, though I’m getting better about it.

Personally, I feel like I’ll have a better time weathering my own blog’s existential tempest. Part of why it has not-so-many readers is simply that my friends aren’t really blog-reading types. That might change in the future. Another part is that there’s no fixed schedule, theme of posts, and so on. To take an interest in this blog is really to take an interest in me because I’m just dumping bits of myself here.

Actually, I’ve regurgitated before my motives for doing what seems to be a silly, self-masturbatory act of writing a blog that (seemingly) no one reads in an earlier post that addresses specifically this. That entry goes a long way towards explaining why I would bother. I should add to that, though, and say that this blog (and my other, more personal stuff elsewhere) is part of my own feedback loop. In large part, I write this because I myself value from this discussion. I might contend that the completion of the thought process isn’t communication or discussion, as maxporter contends, but articulation.

I’ve articulated, for example, the joy I find in making dough, and like I said, I later derive value from that kind of thing myself. I go back and re-explore and re-experience those thoughts and am able to find new perspectives on them, often enough.

This is all beside the point, though. Fostering discussion is a tricky thing, I think. I’ve given more than a few minutes’ thought to the same thing because, even if I do find value in masturbating in a digital echo chamber, I find more value in thoughtful discussion with others and sharing ideas.

I think the key, though, is fostering community. Discussion is a side-effect. There is a whole blogging world, some of whose inhabitants sit in dark corners writing for their own purposes, and some of whom interact with one another. So the key is reading as well as writing, following discussion inside the community with whom I wish to be connected.

I don’t really know what this concept of community will mean to you, but there’s a reason the respected bloggers in, say, the design community or the DIY community or so on have big conferences and small get-togethers, follow one another’s blogs, and generally have relationships with one another. It’s the same reason why most blog software treats linkbacks (such as trackbacks) as on par with comments. It’s the same reason why social media actually took off like it did—status updates don’t make much sense if you’re the only one who ever sees them.

They’re all discussion. Discussion happens all among ourselves. The trick is finding the rest of your blog community.

I’m going to leave this post here and return to this subject at another time because these are raw, nascent thoughts that could use some polishing and further development. Maybe even some discussion.