# Addicted to Blogging - Author: Joichi Ito - Date: 2002-08-18T12:10:54Z So I've been blogging for 54 days now and I'm definitely addicted. I know I've said this before, but it is DEFINITELY different than just having a web page. As Frank warned me, all day long I think about things to blog. Everything I read on the web is potential blog material and I find I am reading much more and chasing all kinds of ideas a lot further than I used to. Also, since I have a Japanese section, I find I have started to try to read Japanese much more. (Even though I still suck.) I write almost every day. Web surfing has taken on a whole new meaning. I have had 4,652 distinct hosts visit the site since I started. Since many people are behind firewalls that appear as single hosts, the number of people who have visited is probably higher. I check my access log and look at the referral list and graphs of the requests to see what events trigger what sort of accesses and see who is sending my how many people. I find myself spamming my friends, messing around with google and doing all sorts of things to try to increase the traffic to the site. (This obsession with traffic may be a subconscious yearning from helping run Infoseek Japan for so long and always trying to catch up. We are in 3rd place after Yahoo and MSN now... But at least we have outlasted the parent. Anyway...) It is kind of like sitting in front of my computer with a bunch of my friends looking over my shoulder. At the same time, I surf around and read other people's blogs looking over their shoulders. I talked to Dan Gillmor yesterday on the phone and he said that the audience is now the media. (Or something like that. Correct me if I'm wrong Dan.) I think the Smartmobs stuff that Howard talks about is about a similar phenomenon. So I'm supposed to be a professional IT investor. I'm also supposed to be spending my time thinking about my work, not farting around on the Net just for fun. Yossi Vardi said that instant messaging was an addictive drug and he (one of the founders of ICQ) was a drug dealer. So where is the money? Is there any money to be made in blogging? There are blogging tools like Movable Type, Radio Userland and Blogger. There are ASP's for bloggers, there is Blogdex a blog crawler/index... but are any of these things really going to make money? The last few years of the Internet bubble were riddled with people trying to make money on stuff that should have been someone's hobby. Maybe the core of blogging is this way. Maybe I should be thinking about what social changes blogging causes and what new businesses this enables or makes obsolete? Maybe I should be thinking about what happens when we integrate P2P, voice, video, IM, home servers and cell phones? Maybe I shouldn't be thinking too much and should keep blogging until it "comes to me." ;-) Anyway... Just a thought... I'm late for a meeting... gotta run! --- #### Categories Blogging about Blogging, Introspective