I remember when podcasting first became a thing, and listening to podcasts meant, to some degree, listening to people talk about what podcasts were. In this sense, podcasts were about podcasting, which was kind of weird but also exciting in its way: what is this new medium, and what is it for?

In the intervening years, we’ve seen podcasting hold on to its vestigial name (the “pod” in “podcast” refers to the iPod, which was the dominant audio player in everyone’s mind at the time) while turning into a nearly perfect form of what they could become: hyper-specific radio-like shows that we can find, and listen to, when we want to listen to them and for however long we have to devote our time and attention to them. Podcasts didn’t replace the radio or listening to music or audiobooks, but they compete with them for our time and attention.

But this post isn’t about podcasting… it’s about blogging, and more specifically, the why. Here’s Chris J. Wilson on being an “unprofessional blogger”:

As an unprofessional blogger, I can write about what I want, when I want not write when I don’t want to (and not apologize!) try out something stupid and fail (but have fun) make grammar and spelling mistakes (and thank kind souls who point them out while deliberately annoying pretentious pedants) make a mess of my website as I change the design

Basically, I can have fun.

These kinds of posts–what is a blogger?–have the same solipsistic ring to them, in a sense, but I think it’s a question that comes up because people who write on the internet for no particular reason (ie they’re not trying to make a living from it) wonder about it. I certainly do.

And here’s Greg Morris, responding to Chris’s post, and defining a difference between a “writer” and a “blogger”:

Bloggers do it for themselves, not for the income. Writers, on the other hand, won’t bother if the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Being a blogger means that writing online, even when your posts are scruffy and error-prone, is something you do for the enjoyment of it, and that’s the best place to be.