I have just finished reading Elliot Jay Stocks’ “Ideas of March” and the original, Chris Shiflett’s “Ideas of March”. It made me realise that at the beginning of the new year I gave myself a couple of New Year’s Resolutions. These resolutions consisted of:

• Daily Excitment
• Daily Photo
• Weekly Lesson
• Blog more!

“Daily Excitement” was my attempt at tweeting once a day at around 8am. My tweet would consist of something that was happening that day that made me excited. As you can tell my the twitter stream I gave up as soon as I went skiing. Why? When I was away skiing, I didn’t really have internet access so I couldn’t really post my daily excitement.

“Daily Photo”, I really wanted to take 1 photo everyday. Just 1 photo. How hard can that be? I have no idea when I stopped that… Probably when I had to restore my iphone without backup and so probably lost all the images.

“Weekly Lesson” was my attempt at writing a weekly tutorial. This went pretty well. But then I started to get lazy, and I started to just upload my slides from my weekly lecture to slideshare, and then that was that! I then started to create a weekly jquery plugin. But I never wrote blog posts on them.

“Blog more!” Although I have definitely blogged more than I did last year. I still haven’t blogged as much as I would like to. It certainly feels like I am blogging less and less each week.

Looking back at my last couple of months, I have already given up on 2 of my resolutions, which leaves the other 2 resolutions only semi continued. I am starting to become lazy with blogging. I am therefore going to try and blog some more, just before I get to the lazy stage. Each of my jQuery plugins I will write a blog post for. I will also start flushing out my slideshare slides with a corresponding blog post.

Why do I like blogging? I like blogging, not because people may read my posts. Is there anyone there? But because it makes me think. It helps me to learn. It helps me to teach. It helps me to create.

In any of the digital industries, actually, any industry, if you want to be at the top of your game you have to keep learning new things. Call me ambitious, call me arrogant, call me whatever you want, but I want to keep pushing to get to the top of my game. The problem / beauty with the industries such as web design, web development, software development, digital advertising, social marketing, or whatever bracket you want to put yourself in, is that there is no “top of the game”. “The game” gets bigger and better every day.

When I blog, when I write a tutorial, when I give a talk, I try to know the most about the subject that I can at any given time. The way I do this is by reading up on the topic. I then try to put everything I know about that topic down on paper / on my blog.

This is why I love blogging.

If you would like to bring the revival of the blog. If you would like to join me, Elliot and Chris, just follow these rules:

• Write a post called Ideas of March.
• List some of the reasons you like blogs.
• Pledge to blog more the rest of the month.
• Share your thoughts on Twitter with the #ideasofmarch hashtag.
• Expand the opinion and validation of your ‘important’ tweets with a short blog post.