I have been writing posts on this blog for more than 7 years. I have more than 2200 posts. That is more than half a million words. I just finished counting them and boy, am I sick of that! (Just kidding.) I email the blog each day to about 100 people and I know more than 90% of them personally. So, I often think of particular people when I write a blog post.
I try to speak to the Learning Is ForEver group here in town at least once a semester. This fall semester, I presented on the subject of "TED Talks,Great Courses and YouTube", three sources of high quality non-fiction in non-print form. I have a presentation coming up on "Characters to Revisit", fiction where at least some of the characters appear in more than one book. Later in the semester, I will give a presentation on Google blogs and web sites, how and why to use them.
Whatever the topic, if you plan to speak or write about something, doing so is a prod to review your knowledge. Since things change quickly these days, it makes sense to put the topic into Google or other search engines like Bing or Duckduckgo and look over the first couple of results pages.
When I retired, I was still interested in promoting the simple practice of meditating for 10 or so minutes a day. I thought a blog might be a way of doing such promotion. As with many hot subjects today, things can change fast and I thought a blog would be a good place for me to record whatever new insights, waves, fads, etc, I learned about. Over time, I just got more interested in writing about ideas of all sorts. At first, the blog was just on the web pages that Google's Blogger makes but then I found that emailing a copy of each post directly into the inbox of people seemed to get it a little more attention.
Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) is sometimes quoted "the prospect of being hanged wonderfully concentrates a man's thoughts". The prospect of having 100 blogs sent to me daily often focuses my thoughts. I do follow more than 100 blogs but my version of following them is not strict or energetic or regular. Every now and then, I sit down with my iPad mini and look through the titles of the blogs I have listed in Feedly, a free "reader" or blog collector.
Some people have told me that they don't read every post I send. No surprise to me. Not every post is worth reading. Different people might gain from different writings.
I do find that writing daily (and keeping several pages of prompts for ideas for further posts) gets me into subjects and into pursuing questions that I would not think of otherwise. Same with preparing a presentation - focuses the mind and pushes me out into subjects and fields I normally wouldn't touch. I had no idea when I started writing this that I would be prompted to look up Samuel Johnson's dates today.
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