I have a few blog-related announcements, which contradict each other only slightly.

Announcement #1: Blogging Guilt Banished Effective immediately, I’m no longer going to feel guilty about going long periods of time between blog posts, and therefore no longer feel obligated to apologize when returning after a long absence. There. I finally said it. I feel much better now.

A typical expectation among people who regularly read blogs is that new entries will occur frequently—at least a few times per week—and that blogs with no new material for a month or so are effectively “stale” and not worth subscribing to anymore. I can’t change the way anyone thinks about blogs, but I can at least admit that my lifestyle just doesn’t accommodate this sort of schedule and probably never will. I’m now officially declaring myself to be OK with that, and I’m not going to try to fight it anymore. I’m just going to go with the flow as best I can.

This has been a difficult issue for me to grapple with, especially since I now contribute to no fewer than six blogs (more on this just ahead), some of which even produce a nontrivial amount of income. But I am not a professional blogger, and as much as I may fantasize about eventually being able to live off my blogging efforts alone, that’s not even remotely the case today, nor is it a top priority for the near future. For now, keeping up with writing blogs is not my life or even my job, it’s just an additional activity in an already full life.

Most of the time, I’m simply too busy doing things to also write about doing them (even when the activities I’m doing themselves include writing). In particular, the whole notion of committing to writing something on a blog every single day—well, for that matter, committing to doing virtually anything every single day—is just contrary to my nature. I’ve done it, but I haven’t enjoyed it, and I can’t sustain it over long periods of time. I don’t have a daily routine and don’t want to have one, but even so, I have relatively little free time. And such free time as I have is time I want to spend relaxing, reading, watching TV, not typing. So unless or until my life situation changes such that blogging is what keeps a roof over my head, it’s going to have to be a pretty random (and perhaps infrequent) activity.

Announcement #2: Yet Another Blog: TidBITS Staff One aspect of the recent redesign to the TidBITS Web site is that each of the staff members now has a “personal” blog. (That’s personal as in “specific to that person,” not “about someone’s personal life.”) And we are all encouraged to put interesting stuff in those blogs, in addition to what we normally write for TidBITS and what we would otherwise write on our personal personal blogs. So, lucky me, I have yet another blog to feed! It’s located here: Joe Kissell’s TidBITS Staff Blog.

In the past, I’ve posted any number of stories here on I Am Joe’s Blog about Mac-related stuff, but now that this new TidBITS blog exists, that’s a more appropriate place for much of that material. So expect the majority of technical topics to migrate there.

This change puts I Am Joe’s Blog in a kind of weird state. Already, I’d shifted most topics relating to my living in France to Truffles for Breakfast and most food-related topics to The Geeky Gourmet; with tech topics now moving to TidBITS, there are fewer and fewer bloggy subjects that don’t already have another home. So, I’m not really sure what’s left to talk about here. Meta discussions about Interesting Thing of the Day and SenseList? Opinions on TV shows, movies, or politics? I don’t know. If there’s something you’d really like me to talk about here, let me know—but no guarantees. Refer to Announcement #1.

Announcement #3: Twittering In case you’ve been living in a cave for the past year, or this is the first Web page you’ve ever seen (Welcome!), one of the latest memes in the online world is something called Twitter. You might think of Twitter as micro-blogging. The idea is basically that, whenever you feel like it, you type a very short message—there’s a 140-character limit—saying what you’re doing right now, or what you’ve recently done, or whatever other little snippet of text is interesting to you at the moment. People can then follow your activities on a Web page, or download any of numerous programs that will display little pop-up windows when any of the people they’re following post something on Twitter. And that’s pretty much that. It’s a really lightweight thing, not big and complex like RSS, no ads (yet!), and no endless backlogs of long news stories or email messages you have to slog through if you’re out of things for a while.

Well, I’ve been resisting Twitter ever since I heard about it months ago. Because honestly, I can’t be bothered to keep telling my computer what I’m doing. I’m notoriously bad about even changing my IM status, because it feels like an annoying, intrusive, extra task. I don’t want a new list of meta-tasks, no matter how brief they may be; I just want to do my thing.

But, on the recommendation of several people who are also generally disinclined to spend time on unnecessary activities, I’m giving it a try. I can’t guarantee how well, how long, or to what extent I’ll use it, but I’m going to make the effort for a little while and see how it goes. If you want to follow me on Twitter, click here or check out the running list in the sidebar of this page. Or see my Twitters on Facebook, not that I’m a very active participant there either.

Announcement #4: Ziki A number of people have inquired as to whether there’s a place they can go to find all my posts from the various blogs I contribute to. As a matter of fact, there are a number of ways to pull this off, but an easy one is simply to go to my page on Ziki.com. Among other things, it shows my recent posts on Interesting Thing of the Day, SenseList, Truffles for Breakfast, The Geeky Gourmet, I Am Joe’s Blog, and TidBITS, which is a good percentage of my online writing. It doesn’t show stuff I’ve done for Macworld or Datamation, but I periodically update the list of books and articles I’ve written, which includes all that stuff, my ebooks, print books, and so on.

We’ve been promising this for a long time, and it has finally sprung to life: Truffles for Breakfast, our new blog about life in France.

Our original idea had been that we’d start the blog at the same time that we “officially” started the process of trying to get to France, so that we could document everything we went through—applying for our visas, dealing with all our household goods, etc.—in real time. Unfortunately, all that stuff kept us so busy that we didn’t have time to write about it too. But now that we’re here and most of the difficult work is behind us, we finally have time to sit down and reflect on what happened before, as well as begin writing about day-to-day life here.

As I said in Introducing Truffles for Breakfast, one reason for the new blog is laziness (or, to put it more positively, efficiency): it saves us from having to retell our stories many times. But we also hope it’ll be an inspiration for anyone who’s thought about doing something like this, and a resource for people who want to move to France in particular but have found the existing information available to be somewhat unhelpful.

We’ve got about a dozen posts up already, with dozens more in the pipeline. Enjoy!

A few days ago I was talking to my mother on the phone, and I mentioned that Morgen has a new blog, Spectatrix, about life as an introvert. In the process of explaining what the blog was about, I mentioned in passing something about my being an introvert too, and my mother was incredulous. “You? An introvert? You’ve got to be kidding! I mean, I knew I was an introvert, but you?” Well, I was shocked that she was shocked. But on further reflection, I think we were working from very different definitions of what it means to be an introvert, and I can see how easily someone (even someone who’s known me my whole life) might therefore make that mistake.

If you’ve ever taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, you know that the first personality component it produces is I for introvert or E for extrovert. (I’m an INTJ, in case you were wondering.) The sense of “introvert/extrovert” measured by this test is a specific psychological definition. As the Wikipedia puts it, where one falls on the “I/E” axis

show how a person orients and receives their energy. In the extroverted attitude the energy flow is outward, and the preferred focus is on other people and things, whereas in the introverted attitude the energy flow is inward, and the preferred focus is on one’s own thoughts, ideas and impressions.

In other words, extroverts get more energy from being around other people, whereas introverts get more energy from being alone, and find that being around others tends to drain their energy. This is very different from the colloquial sense of “introvert” as someone who’s shy, timid, withdrawn, or even misanthropic. I’m none of those things, and in fact I love speaking in front of crowds and throwing parties. But I have to do these things in moderation, and on my own terms. Given the choice, I’d almost always rather be with fewer people than with many, and I’d be happier still to be alone. Of course, it makes a lot of difference who the other people are and what they’re doing. If there’s a lot of noise involved, or if people are crowded close around me, that’s not so good, but if the crowd is more spread out and quieter, then my tolerance goes up; it goes up even more if the people are friends rather than strangers.

From what we’ve read, it sounds like Morgen and I are fairly typical introverts (although she’s further toward the “I” side of the scale than I am), and what she’s written on Spectatrix certainly rings true for me. Introverts tend to have a lower tolerance for noise and a greater need for personal space than extroverts, but there’s certainly a lot of variation. So although I might chalk up some personality trait as being “because” I’m an introvert, there could be other reasons—and it may not be true for other introverts, or true to a different degree.

A few people have expressed confusion at the notion of an introvert running a blog, as though by definition we should be very private people who want to avoid attention of any kind. I guess Morgen and I are pretty private people, but the great thing about the Web is that it lets us share information about ourselves with lots of people in a way that doesn’t drain our energy, since we’re not interacting with everyone at once, or in person. I’ve corresponded with I can’t tell you how many thousands of people who have read one of my books, articles, or Web posts, and because the interactions are all done from the privacy of my office, by typing rather than talking, it’s always felt completely neutral in terms of draining my energy. Again, that may not be true of all introverts, but I think many people would be surprised how many actors, singers, politicians, and even high-profile bloggers would identify themselves as introverts.

As I discussed in The Fourth Anniversary of ITotD, Interesting Thing of the Day turned 4 on Sunday. That must be 28 in blog years, but then, when I started the site I had no idea I was becoming a blogger. (I still sort of don’t believe that, but the fact that I’m making that claim here, on yet another blog, suggests that I’m just in denial.)

I know of professional bloggers who do nothing but crank out posts all day long, sometimes by the dozens, on several different blogs. Some of them even make a handsome living doing so. For me, though, quality has always been much more important than quantity. I can type as many words per day as they next guy, but the actual writing isn’t where I spend the bulk of my time. Regardless of the subject matter I’m dealing with, I typically spend about half my time doing research, a quarter of my time writing, and another quarter editing and rewriting. The majority of what I read on the Web was written with very little research and even less editing. And I understand that this approach works well for a lot of people—writers and readers alike. It’s just not my thing. Maybe I’m too old-school, and maybe it’s not the path to rapid riches, but I prefer to take my time.

Because of these predilections, and because Interesting Thing of the Day has steadfastly resisted categorization, it didn’t go quite according to my initial plan. But four years later, it’s starting to get there.

A (Not-So-) Brief History of Interesting Thing of the Day My very first article for Interesting Thing of the Day¹ was full of optimism about how I’d found my true calling as a Curator of Interesting Things, how I intended to make a full-time job out of writing these articles, and how I wasn’t particularly concerned about the site’s ability to make money. Looking back now, I don’t know how I thought I could produce a new article of up to 1,500 words every single day (weekends and holidays included), or how I imagined that without any ads or overt selling, the site could make enough money for me to live on. For more than seven solid months I did pull off the article-every-day feat (with the help of a few articles from guest authors). The site had attracted a small but loyal group of regular readers, but it also made barely any money—and after all that work with so little reward, I was completely burned out. I decided to go on a hiatus, during which time I focused on my technical writing, which at least paid the bills reliably.

Version 2.0: A couple of months into my recuperation, I heard about this groovy new thing called Google AdSense. I figured I had nothing to lose by putting the code on the site to display contextual ads, so I did. Much to my amazement, all those articles that had just been sitting there on the site for months suddenly started making money. Not a lot, at first, but enough to make me think there might be something to this whole enterprise after all. So I retooled the site, committing myself to another year of daily articles—some of which were recycled and updated versions of those from the first run, and the rest of which were new. I also jumped on the podcast bandwagon, producing audio recordings of every article, and began offering paid subscriptions that entitled readers to get, among other things, the full text of each daily article by email.

That year, from June 2004 to May 2005, was more difficult than I’d expected. Readership increased, and a nontrivial number of people purchased subscriptions. Since I was writing fewer new articles than I had during that first stretch, the work was a bit less grueling. But by the end of that year, I realized I couldn’t afford to be spending so much of my time—often 30–40 hours per week—doing something that wasn’t contributing meaningfully to paying the rent. I decided to take more time off, with the intention of giving the site a complete makeover and coming up with ways to make it less labor-intensive. In the meantime, I again ran articles from the archives, but in a change from my previous schedule, skipped weekends and holidays. I thought that break might last a few months, but it stretched to an entire year.

Version 3.0: In May 2006, Interesting Thing of the Day had its second grand re-opening. We had a new logo and a completely redesigned site. I changed lots of features in an attempt to make the site more modern, efficient, and user-friendly. And I announced that I was adopting a burnout-resistant schedule: new articles would appear, on average, about twice a week, but with no particular guarantees; recycled articles would fill in some of the off days to keep the content reasonably dynamic. I can’t tell you how much I struggled with that decision, because it meant that Interesting Thing of the Day was no longer literally of-the-day, something I’d considered of central importance from the beginning. But I felt it was the only way I could potentially keep the site going indefinitely.

And now, even the site’s income is finally beginning to think about edging into a somewhat interesting region. By “interesting,” I mean that I can now conceive of the possibility that, if current trends continue, I might actually be able to make Interesting Thing of the Day my full-time job after all in a year or two. Working on nothing but ITotD was what I envisioned when we started on April 1, 2003, and at the time, I thought it might take about six months. So maybe it takes six years instead. But I can just start to see the faint suggestion of a dim light at the distant end of a long tunnel. (I hope that’s enough qualifiers!) To help the process along, I’m officially asking for donations. Perhaps I’ll even turn it into an annual membership drive, à  la PBS or Daring Fireball. But we’ll see what happens.

Famous for Being Famous If I’ve learned one lesson from Interesting Thing of the Day in the last year, it’s that popularity is self-reinforcing. That should have been obvious, but it seems that the site had to very slowly work its way up to a certain threshold, a certain reasonably high number of readers, before the rate of popularity began to increase significantly. Today, in addition to all those FeedBurner readers, the site is getting vastly more “ordinary” visitors than it did a year ago, and the number is trending ever more sharply upward. The site is essentially the same as it always was, but more people knowing about it led to more people knowing about it, and all of a sudden lots and lots of people know about it.

I started out thinking, naively, that all I had to do was to build a quality site and the word would spread like wildfire. What I really had to do was build a quality site, wait for several years, redesign it a few times, and experience a bit of luck. But sure enough, it’s finally getting getting close to what I envisioned all those years ago.

¹That article is no longer online, I’m afraid; it got recycled during one of the site’s overhauls. Just as well: it’s a bit embarrassing to read nowadays.