The Urge to Keep Writing, Continued

Had a lot of good comments on that post from a couple of days ago, titled “The Urge to Keep Writing.” Some nice words, too, for which I thank the commentors.

Since not everyone might’ve seen the comments -- and since this is, in fact, one of those “milestone” posts (today’s is the 1,200th) that tend to inspire the same kind of self-reflection I was engaging in on Tuesday -- I thought I’d use today’s post to share some of what was said in response to that one.

The post was mainly me wondering aloud about the place and/or relevance of poker blogs these days. For a variety of reasons, it seems fewer are writing them and fewer are reading them. And so I found myself thinking that morning about Hard-Boiled Poker and my desire to keep posting, despite these contrary trends.

In the post I made a reference to the “five minutes” out of each day I estimated it took folks to read my daily missives, and speculating whether or not these days that might be too much to ask. F-Train noted how in today’s media-saturated world the cut-off seems to be around three minutes. Thus, when confronted with a “wall of text” such as will happen sometimes when someone lands at Hard-Boiled Poker, some might quickly click elsewhere rather than commit.

F-Train concluded by agreeing that blogs still have a place, even if they aren’t as central to our conversations about poker as they might’ve been a few years back. NT then commented that these other, competing forms of communication or “social media” such as Facebook and Twitter will probably also eventually fade from prominence, presumably to be replaced by something else.

Hoyazo chimed in, building on a point that F-Train had raised regarding the fact that after several years of writing about poker, it has become harder for everyone to find something new about which to write. Thus, says Hoyazo, the move by many away from blogs and over to Twitter is partly related to the fact that folks simply have less to say nowadays than they might have in the past.

Luke in his comment picked up on a sentence in my post where I mentioned being much more “cognizant of having an audience” today than I was when I first started the blog long ago. He smartly adds that we all have an audience -- always -- whether we recognize that fact or not.

Finally, Drizztdj pointed out how time constraints keep him from blogging as much as he’d like, something I think most of us who keep blogs can appreciate.

As I said on Tuesday, I do remain inspired to continue posting here regularly. I’ll definitely keep all of these thoughts and ideas in mind, though, as I move forward.

While I write for many reasons, I probably wouldn’t keep at this if I didn’t believe I was communicating in a meaningful way with others. In other words, it’s important to me that whatever it is I’m doing here represents a worthwhile contribution to our many conversations about poker. And not just a bunch of “walls of text” standing as barriers between me and you!

Thanks again for the feedback, folks. And thanks also, again, to everyone else for reading.