In doing long essay-style posts I miss out on some of the conversation and discussion that would be possible if I did shorter blog postings. Thus if I started a topic, allowed people to bring up issues, and then continued with more postings later with information, I might have be able to draw more from my readers.

However, the problem with this is that discussion dies down and both it and the blog posting disappear. My longer essay style blog postings seem to get referenced by others for quite some time.

Have you ever heard of BlogHer? Women having big conferences about how to make blogging more honest, how to increase the number of female bloggers, how to target important issues through blogging… what??? The fact that blogging has become about the act and not the content… that’s where it’s not cool anymore.

I violate almost every rule that I hear people say what is required to have a successful blog, but I do consider “Life With Alacrity” to be successful within what my goals were:

* Spread some memes that I thought were missing from the discourse on the net.
* Be a part of the blogging community without it consuming all my time.
* Establish myself as being more then an expert on cryptographic security (I got pigeonholed as I wrote the IETF TLS standard)
* Gain control of my net identity – I wanted who I was when someone googled me on the net to be my words, not what others said about me.

Those are pretty modest goals, and they have been successful. Note that I didn’t have in my goals to be an A-list (or even B-list) blogger, or to be the top blogger in my chosen category, or to make a living of my writing or speaking. My chosen blogging style would probably not work for that.