Well-thought posts - and a break

©kenyee (Flickr) / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Well-thought blog posts rarely get the attention I have paid to them.

There is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong because I do not write well-thought posts for the amount of attention they receive. Although it helps to get some attention. Yet, in principle, well-thought posts are just ways to focus my own attention.

In a well-thought blog post ideas are put into order. A well-thought blog post is holding ideas that would disappear otherwise. Explicit or implicit links in these posts are as much an expression of appreciation as they are a way of connecting with ideas and thoughts of others to make their reflections become part of my own reasoning.

Well-thought posts never get the amount of attention I have paid to them, but when I read them again I know why I wrote them. I remember how much attention I devoted to them. And the thoughts re-appear instantaneously. The thoughts I have linked in the past get re-linked to the present. My attention gets refocused.

All my blog posts are crystallised thoughts. But often they are just crystallised thoughts of laughter or anger. Sometimes they are just a way to handle insomnia. Sometimes they are procrastination. Yet, from time to time - though too rarely - they are solidified reflections that have been going around my mind for weeks.

These well-thought posts are long posts made shorter. A lot of what has been thought for these posts is not written down and a lot that was written down has been erased in the final version. Many words that were in these posts have gone because they did not fit. They have disappeared for good reason before being published. They did not belong where I first thought they could be.

Well-thought posts never get the attention I have paid to them because you cannot measure attention to words and links and pictures that have been erased. And well-thought posts may have also remained unwritten for a long time or unpublished though finalised for days, time spans you cannot see once the posts are made public.

In the end, any external attention - readership or comments or links - can only be directed towards those words that have been written down and published, not to the words that have not seen the daylight. And so external attention may even be a useless concept in the case of well-thought posts.

I believe that well-thought blog posts are not written to get external attention because the attention can hardly be appropriate. The attention well-thought posts receive while they are thought and written thus has to be self-sufficient - which is why not many of them get thought, written and published.

Well-thought posts may not even be good.

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This is the last blog post for the next 2-3 weeks. I will continue commenting and tweeting moderately but the blog is having a definitive rest.

In the meantime, follow the latest posts of over 550 euroblogs on Bloggingportal.eu. You will see that this blog is just a small part of an ever growing treasure - the eurosphere - so please enjoy all the other gems you find in our treasure chest!