michaelmistretta.com

The other day I was sitting in my bed just surfing the web. You know when you get to that place where you’ve done all that you’ve had to do, and you just surf? You just go wherever the tide takes you? I love that feeling. Because it is in those moments that I see things.

When I began this year, I started fresh. New blog. New Camera. New Flickr account. Everything was new. And I didn’t want to fall into the trap that so many people fall into. I didn’t want to get to a place where I dreaded blogging and taking photos. I didn’t want to forget my blog, and leave it, like countless other abandoned blogs in the blogosphere. I wanted to have a presence on the Internet. An online home.

So what did I do? I made a commitment to blog and upload a photo each day. I thought that taking part in Blog365, and writing something each day would do just that. At first it worked. But slowly, I started to become a slave to it. I felt that a blog post every day was my duty, and it quickly began to lose its appeal.

While I was sitting in my bed that one morning, I pointed my browser to ShawnBlanc.net. I’d been there before, and I’d subscribed, but I saw it differently this time. This was not just a blog. This was a window into Shawn’s life. And then it hit me. That was what I wanted. That is what I was trying to achieve. I looked at my own blog, and saw the pointless, passionless words I was writing. I realized that I would not even want to read content like this. I knew I needed a change.

So I decided to end Blog365. I no longer want to blog once a day, every day. It has lost it’s appeal for me. I want to be free. Free to blog once a week or once a day. Free to blog whenever I want. That was what I admired about Shawn’s blog. It wasn’t always a long post. Sometimes it was a quote. Sometimes it was a link. But from those quotes and links, I could see what kind of person that Shawn was. Even when he was writing about technology or an certain application, you could picture the person behind the words. You could see who he is. And I really admired that. That’s what I want for my own blog.

I took that realization, and made some changes in my online life. I cleaned out my RSS feeds. I cleaned out my twitter. I cleaned out my blog. I was tired of being bombarded by all the senseless information of the Internet. I unsubscribed from the hundreds of news blogs, and subscribed to blogs whose content I enjoyed reading. I cleaned out my digital life, and now I have a sense of freedom that I’ve never felt before. It felt good.

Now some may say that I failed at Blog365. Maybe I have. But the reason I was doing Blog365 was to build up my presence on the Internet. And I feel that I am now taking steps in the right direction. If you want to know what I’m up to, you can always follow me on Twitter, and you can find my photography on Flickr. Maybe I won’t have a chance to update them every single day, but when I do, it will be content that defines me.

At the same time, I’ve been thinking about what will become of this blog. I’m going to be blogging regularly, but not necessarily every day. I want this blog to be a reflection of me (it is MichaelMistretta.com after all). If I find an inspiring quote or an interesting link, I will post that. If I have something pulling on my heart, I’ll post that. But from this day forward, there will not be content posted on this blog that does not reflect who I am.