In my opinion, the strongest similarity in between Blogging and Twittering is the dropout rate. In the last few weeks the buzz has been all about how many people quit Twitter after having used it for a few weeks. Although to a slower pace, this was and still is also true of blogging.

The New York Times had a great piece on the topic this week, called "Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest". Here is the highlight:

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

95%! And I have no problem believing that number. So then why am I starting a blog? I've created plenty of blog-like sites (LiveJournal, Blogger) and either never made a single post or slowly abandoned them. I rarely open Facebook, I have an Twitter account but have never posted a single tweet, nor do I follow anyone. I use the twitter search for very specific things, but that's about it.

So why? Well, I think that the mistakes that a lot of blogs make (and I've made it) is that they basically try to tell you about their personal lives or how they feel about things and the bottom line is: nobody cares. Shocking, I know. But I think that if you're going to blog, you should make some attempt in there to be contributing something useful to some community, somewhere.

So my goal here is really to just have a place where I can post how-tos, write about new programming frameworks and technology, and sometimes post a political thought or two. Initially, I think my goal will be one post a week, we'll see if I can stick to that and take it from there.