I have asked myself more than once: Why do you write a blog?

But each time, I couldn’t find a clear answer. Recently, this blog has been updated very infrequently, to be precise, since late August until now, for about 50 days. With fewer updates, naturally, the traffic has also decreased, with only about 10 IPs per day, a stark contrast to the 300-400 IPs per day at the end of last year.

Why write a blog?

I managed to get through these days without writing a blog, but suddenly, I felt like something was missing in life. Every time I opened the homepage of ifosu.com, my mind went blank. So now, lying in bed, I’m editing this on my phone, trying to explain the reasons behind this phenomenon.

This act of updating the blog via phone after the school cut off the computer’s internet connection also shows the unique affection people like me have for blogging.

Life is full of the mundane, which directly leads us to easily overlook the brilliant moments in life. Once we recall them, we are bound to feel regretful and sigh.

Some people call blogs journals, which serve a similar purpose to diaries. I wrote many diaries during my elementary and middle school years. A few days ago, I went home and found the diaries I wrote in high school in a large wooden box on the second floor. They had been ravaged by mice, but I still managed to write seven or eight books, with some relatively complete sentences remaining in my memory. After pondering for a long time, I realized a very realistic shortcoming of mine: over-reliance on memory.

The diaries I wrote back then were largely for my future self to reminisce, but I often overestimated my memory. I frequently used pronouns to replace the context of events or people when recording or commenting, making it quite laborious to read.

The drawbacks of traditional diaries include inconvenient storage, difficulty in retrieval, and challenges in revision, all of which hinder people’s motivation to persist.

In the internet age, there are many ways for people to express their thoughts. On the internet alone, there are forums, blogs, Q&A systems, encyclopedia systems, chat software, news comments, and more. But for people like us who often drift online and occasionally write articles or paragraphs we consider excellent, over time, we find that too much of our past efforts have sunk without a trace, failing to realize their due value. Thus, we begin to search for a tool to record our online journey, and blogs come into our view.

The essence of a blog lies in creating or sharing information valuable to others, but it doesn’t mean a blog merely narrating daily life has no value.

Often, when we first start a blog, we are confused. If we can only have one blog, should it be a tool for exchanging professional knowledge, a witness to personal life, study, and work, or a melting pot of information?

At this point, many people abandon what they consider secondary content, some giving up on life records, others on sharing professional knowledge. The main reason is that it’s hard for one person to manage several blogs simultaneously.

Time-consuming, labor-intensive, and the need for persistence are the main issues that constrain ordinary people from running a blog.

Writing this, the purpose of my article becomes clear: to explore where my blog is headed. A basic fact lies before me: I may no longer be related to law.

Law is a vast and ancient discipline. Based on any minor professional angle within this discipline, one can provide a professional analysis of the ever-changing legal events in society.

Unfortunately, in my years of blogging, I seem to have missed this. Similar to me, when reading the experiences of many seniors in the same field, I found that they also largely abandoned this basic writing subject.

Personally, I analyze the reasons, there are two:

1. Few people; Among many disciplines, those most likely and motivated to run and update blogs are those directly related to computer and internet knowledge. Among the decent personal independent blogs, most are about internet and computer research. In the legal field, only a few like ITLAW and Internet Law Blog exist decently. But reading their articles is not a pleasure, often falling into a cycle of knowledge. The knowledge analysis used in the case of this article is likely to repeat in another case. Although there are improvements, they can’t escape the inherent legal thinking: stating the basic facts of the case, then presenting others’ views as if to introduce their own. After writing for a long time, their basic views are exhausted, and further writing is just old wine in a new bottle, hard to sustain. Few practitioners, opportunities and pressures coexist, with pressure outweighing opportunities. The pressure here is not about writing, but about the loneliness of writing without communication, which is a waste, better to debate in legal forums.

2. High writing threshold; Legal knowledge is vast, and university studies seem superficial. A simple example is, when undergraduates encounter a legal fact and need to state their views, they often first think of what the law stipulates, or delve deeper, what a certain legal school or jurist holds. As for writing techniques, they still can’t escape the rules of answering essay questions: stating legal facts, analyzing the legality and rationality of each minor fact from the aforementioned angles, and summarizing whether the legal fact is a legal issue or a human behavior violation. This is the norm. Usually, professional blog topics need enough attraction. Where does the attraction of legal blogs come from? Unexpected views! Here, unexpected means the views of the audience or the third party differ from or conflict with the views expressed in the blog. Generally, those who study law know that stating a known view is not too difficult, but fully stating a legal view different from known others is as hard as climbing the Shu Road. Usually, we need enough and strong external justifications to prove the correctness of our views’ premises, which are not or hardly the knowledge and methods undergraduates can master. It requires a lot of accumulated theoretical and practical knowledge to assist, the difficulty is evident. I look at it and step back, defeated at the starting line.

After clarifying that the blog content is unrelated to law, how to continue the blog has become the most confusing issue.

Life keeps moving forward, and learning is endless. Perhaps I need to start a new field as the leading direction of the blog. But this reflects an unprofessional attitude, hoping to change direction in the future. SEO or something, I can’t be bothered.

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