In college, I tried to take a course called “Thinking About Thinking.” In addition to the appeal of the intriguing title, it was taught by such academic celebrities as Stephen Jay Gould, Alan Dershowitz, and another, less famous professor whose name I can’t remember. I went to the first lecture or two, but it was quite a popular course and evidently I didn’t get into the course. At least, it’s not my transcript so I assume I didn’t make the lottery.

Being the innovative intellectual blogger that I am, I decided to take the professors’ idea to the next level. That’s right, I am blogging about blogging. Perhaps you guessed that’s where this was going because of the title of the post.

I’ve been posting to infobhan for years now, I’m always tempted to abandon it for some easier-to-consume format. At one extreme is Twitter: it’s great for a quick thought or comment, forcing me to distill my thoughts into 140-character soundbytes, but it can’t replace the sheer joy I get from rambling on this site. I’ve dabbled into Facebook – it succeeds in bundling social networking services into a neat package, but ultimately seems to be creating it’s own microcosm of the internet and lacks the flexibility of more open, albeit more targeted, services like Flickr and Twitter. I thought about trying to simplify my posting with an integrated blogging system like Tumlbr, but I find I rarely actually read anyone’s Tumblog. While it seems appealing that you could capture both Twitter-length mini-messages with full blog posts, viewing these interspersed with random photos and links seems somewhat disjointed.

As I searched for the right platform, I asked myself the same question all bloggers ask themselves: why do I blog? The answer, of course, is a bastardization of this site’s tagline: I blog because I am. We blog to prove our existence, to contribute some proof that we are still alive and thinking. But this brings me to the nightmare that all bloggers have…what if no one is reading? It’s a fear that even I must confess to having from time to time. “How can that be?” you ask. “Surely a wise and experience blogger such as yourself must know that there is a wide audience reloading this page hourly in anticipation of your wise words.”

Well, those are comforting words. And yes, I know I am blessed with admiring fans. But fame can fade and I may be left one day with a dwindling audience and the need to ask myself if I should go on posting. Until that day, I hope you enjoy reading.