Meta: Blogging is difficult

The Axis of Eval is my second blog, after the venerable plans within plans within plans. (Yeah, there were others.)

Both of these blogs have gone through the same stages:

1. A few days of writing in solitude with a couple of friends.
2. Chris Neukirchen mentions the blog on Anarchaia or Trivium.
3. Al3x twitters about it.
4. Attack of the unwashed HN masses (just kidding).

It's hard to go from 1 to N. The rush of thousands of readers is great, but it's confusing (being able to write to thousands of peers in real-time isn't really accounted for by our DNA and social structure). For me, it's kinda hard to write when I know that a post I write will show up in the inboxes of many people most of which I don't know.

I'd like to keep a certain entertaining and informative niveau, and in the best case, I'd also like to improve it. In the early days, aggressive diss-posts and funny flames flow freely, because the audience is small and trusted. And those posts are entertaining. But in a more public setting, I have a bit of a bad feeling writing them, because I feel they may harm people I write about, when all I'm intending is to vent about some ideas I think are bad or ridiculous, or would like to tell a stupid joke.

So, what I want to say is that there are some difficulties to blogging that are seldom written about, and I'm still trying to figure out the boundaries of this strange new thingy, and where to draw the line between fact and fiction in blogging.

--Manuel