The Unifying Theme of System 13

I was talking to Nils this morning when he mentioned that, while he’s been reading my blog for a while now, when he first saw it, he didn’t quite “get it.” He wasn’t sure what it was really about. Here’s what he actually said (oh, how I love the fact that Gmail saves all of my Gmail chats):

I have to admit that system13 didn’t ‘register’ immediately though9:46 AM I mean, I subscribed rather early on, as soon as I discovered it, but it stayed vague… if that makes sense it’s only after a while, when you get to know the blog and the person behind it, that you get to form a mental image more

This confused me a bit - what did he not get? After thinking on it some more, though, I suppose I do understand the confusion. My blog is about a lot of things: my personal life, stuff I read, stuff I do, along with things that aren’t exactly my “life”: my views on things, things I find on the internet.. basically, if it falls under my nose and I find it interesting, there’s a good chance that I’ll be blogging about it. He’s right, really: my blog is vague, in a sense, and unless I decide to make it into a niche blog (which I doubt is going to happen, in, um, ever), it will continue to be “vague” in that particular sense. He’s also right that when you first start reading a blog, particularly a personal blog, it’s hard to really know where the person is coming from. Unless you go back and read through all of the archives (a daunting task, to be sure), until you’ve read for a while, you don’t know the person. You don’t know where they’re coming from, or where they’re going.

My blog, along with countless other personal blogs, is related, in a way, to the book Freakonomics. Near the beginning of the book, the authors commented on the fact that, unlike most books, theirs’ had no unifying theme. My blog is like that: it has no “unifying theme.” There is no one topic that I write about; there is nothing that I focus on more than other things, at least not intentionally. If there’s anything that might be called a unifying theme for my blog, it would simply be that the blog is written by me.