In which Matt wishes a late happy birthday to hit-or-miss.org.
Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my first entry (under the original clever blog name “Matthew Kingston’s Weblog”). I hesitate to even mention this as my first entries were pretty pathetic. I didn’t really get up to speed until last September.

It took me a while to find a voice for my weblog, and I still don’t know that I really ever have. At first, I just tried writing about what was going on at Indiana University, thinking that I’d get people I knew to read my weblog. That never really happened, but for some reason other people started reading my blog and I somehow become part of the “weblog community.”

I’ve tried covering pop culture, glbt news, linux news, higher education news – whatever strikes my fancy at the time. There’s never really been any pattern or plan, nor have all my entries been interesting even to myself – thus the name I finally settled on for my weblog: hit-or-miss.

Then, I couldn’t figure out how much gay content I wanted in my weblog, so I spun off Web Queeries and invited other glbt webloggers to join (my own participation has varied over time).

This summer I took a little vacation from blogging and thought a lot about why I write a weblog. I’ve been busy with my new job and trying to get into a jogging routine, and it’s been hard to find to keep up with hit-or-miss. So why haven’t I stopped?

I do like to blog things so I can find them later (like online CD store coupons), but if it’s something I read about on another blog I can always search Blogger for it later, so I find that I’m blogging fewer and fewer “sites” and instead I am writing more “personal,” journal-like entries.

I blog not just for myself, but because it allows to make a connection with other people over the internet. I’ve used the internet to correspond with people since starting college, but I never really began to care about anyone on the net until I started reading their weblogs. For example, I’ve “known” Mark since I joined the Sondheim-mailing list 7 years ago, but I never really felt like I knew him well until he started his weblog. The same holds for Bill Jennings and David Levy.

I like that people visit my site because they’re interested in my life and what I’m looking at on the net. I don’t get off on it because it’s a popularity contest.

Your mileage may vary with my blog, just like mine does. But that’s the whole point. This is just a kind of hit or miss affair.