Is a blog without readers really a blog?

Jeff Atwood famously said, back in 2006 when blogs mattered and people cared what a blog was, that a blog without comments is not a blog. Now that I’ve finally set aside my fanciful goals in a website, abandoned static site generators and self-hosting, and just gone with WordPress.com, I’ve left comments enabled and so I guess in that sense, this is indeed a blog. But don’t blogs also have, you know, multiple people who read them?

I think the classic tradeoff is niche vs. personal. I say “classic” because the recognition goes back to at least the 2000s as well, and it seems to apply to any would-be blog:

• Niche: focus on a specific topic or combination of topics. This works well for a professional website. You can reasonably advertise your website in professional spaces such as LinkedIn, and you can reasonably expect to gradually build up a trickle of regular visitors who are specifically interested in your chosen topic.
• Personal: write about what interests you, as it interests you. You get regular visitors if you’re famous, or have many kind Web-using friends or family.

In proportion to my having historically been drawn toward the niche approach, what’s weird is that the blogs which have truly drawn me in are the emphatically and unabashedly personal. And after years of starting and discarding websites of my own, the one I’m sticking with is (best I can) just that.

I think it’s because if I read someone for long enough and appreciate what he or she writes enough, I begin to care about him or her as a person. And you get to know someone through a “personal” blog in a way you don’t through a typical “professional.” People do technical writing and Vim scripting and web development and book authoring, but people are so much more than any of those “niches,” whether the niches be passion or profession.

Another angle to this question: when I read someone who I care about—either because I know him in real life, or because I’ve developed care for him through reading his blog for 13 years—it doesn’t tend to matter what the topic is, I am interested in what he says. (Particularly good writers are that way, too. Perhaps I just tend to read such people.)

Perhaps, setting aside fame and authority and a notable platform from which to address masses—heights I formerly thought I dreamt of—there is a chance here to spark or fan genuine human relationship (maybe especially for those of us who, so far from wearing our emotions on our shirtsleeves, carry them around in a dump truck and stand prepared to bury the first sympathetic passerby). Perhaps this fascination with personal blogs, and my at-long-last settling on one myself, are just a part of my painful and long-lived search for… friendship.

Perhaps I will blog about that some day…