I’ve been thinking about this over the past few days and, no, it’s not because I’m a goth deep inside.

I think it’s because of two reasons: one, the article/essay-style approach where I’m basically pretending to write for some magazine or newspaper and, two, because I honestly think that if it weren’t for FriendFeed and my exposure to social media in general, I wouldn’t write about this stuff anyway. So, it’s form and subject.

There’s a certain kind of formality present in these sorts of blogs where, to be taken seriously, you need to present yourself and your subject matter seriously. And, for a long time there, I quaintly thought about working to become the next voice in social media and technology blogs. But, oh, man, how boring is all of that. Yeah, I enjoy it. I’m an early adopter. I’m a tech enthusiast. But so are the next ten thousand people with blogs and they’re all writing the same thing. Sure, I can add some funny to it. I can pretend to be the Larry David of tech blogging or emulate Hunter S. Thompson and just go sideways with it. But, honestly, I’d be dressing up a corpse. I’d be trying to convince myself—and everyone else—that this is something that I actually want to do. I have no problem with actually writing; I’m naturally verbose. I have no problem rambling off six or seven paragraphs in a short period of time. Once I find that ‘hook’ that I can reel my thoughts in on, it usually comes together with a minimal amount of fuss. In fact, most everything posted here was written spontaneously and, with a few minor edits here and there, is essentially first draft material. This isn’t bragging; this is me counting my blessings that I don’t have to labor over it. If I had to labor over it, well… let’s just say I probably wouldn’t. I like to write but I don’t want to write about Apple and FriendFeed and whatever unless I absolutely have something real to write about rather than just more navel-gazing and theorizing.

If you use the word ’should’ a lot, you’re probably not a journalist; you’re just a blogger who likes to daydream. And, you know, that’s exactly not what I want to be doing. I’m boring myself and I’d probably be boring you lot if I wrote more and didn’t bother to dress up the text and make it more exciting than it actually is.

So, is this the end of this blog? Yes. Definitely. No doubt about it. At least, it’s the end of this blog in this format. I’ve done long-form blogging. I’ve done it off-and-on since 1996 and, when on, I usually wrote 6-10 paragraph posts for each day (even if I wrote several days at once and backfilled them). And I’ve done microblogging. Twitter’s too terse and traditional blogging’s too loose. So, I need to find some middle way between the two. Technically, that’s FriendFeed but I want a little more flexibility and I want it to be under my own site and done in my own way.

So, this is yet another in a long series of blog failures and I’m fine with that. I’ll figure out exactly what it is that I want to do that will make me want to write stuff here rather than FriendFeed. Some medium format blogging. Basically, probably a homespun version of Posterous.

Until then, relax that there will be one less douchebag out there trying to blog about technology as if he were an expert or a professional. I’m neither. Although I just might be a douchebag.

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