Over the last few years, various people have suggested to me that I start a blog. My answer: “Why?????” I think I have interesting things to say from time to time, but not every day (let’s face it, most people’s random thoughts and observations are not consistently interesting). And when I have something I want to write about, I’m usually too lazy to sit down and do it. I’d rather comment in on other people’s blogs, which I can do when I feel inspired — without having to worry about keeping it up regularly, whether I feel like it or not.

There’s so much noise out there, why add to it without a good reason?

In fact, a couple of days ago I took about 75% of the blogs out of my blog bookmark folder and either deleted them or stuck them in a less easily accessible folder. For one thing, I’ve decided not to read any political blogs for a while because reading them makes me angry and frustrated about things I can’t do anything about. I deleted a few more that have become defunct. And there are some that I just don’t read any more because they’re not consistently interesting. Yours is one of the handful that stuck. And I need to add Scalzi’s, which I’ve been intending to read regularly.

This attitude that everybody should want to blog, and almost anybody can do a good job of it — where did it come from?