I feel like the old guy at the club, and it's seriously affecting my ability to blog.

You may have noticed -- or not -- that I've been pretty terrible at updating this blog for the last two or three years, which leads me to wonder why in the hell you've even visited this Web site today in the first place. As someone who used to care about increasing my blog readership, I know as well as anyone that inactivity is among the best ways to ensure that your blog dies a slow death. You don't fill it with new material, and it'll lead to apathy, and eventually people will forget they used to surf through your Web site everyday when they were bored at work and at one point or another kind of sort of liked reading your stuff.

I stopped reading Mitch Albom's column, for example, when he decided it might be cool to write whenever he felt like it, which if I recall was roughly once every three or four weeks, in between vacations and a handful of 100-page, made-for-TV books that earned him millions. Of course, the difference between me and Mitch is that Mitch still has his 500,000 to 600,000 loyal readers who are willing to check in and out of his section at the Detroit Free Press Web site until they see a new column. I've lost all five of my loyal readers because they found other, better maintained blogs on the World Wide Web.

Also, I moved to Dallas, so they've forgotten about me.

Assholes.

I have an easy explanation for why I've lost my love of the blog, and it gets to the heart of why I felt compelled to update today, like, five months after my previous one.

Some of you might know that I haven't written or reported for a living since 2003. I took a break from it for a while because I wanted to try some other things, like magazine work and editing, and basically my career path has taken me in a different direction. Virtually all of my experience over the last four years is in magazines and editing, and now it's almost like I don't have a choice. There's no turning back. Reporting isn't even an option for me anymore -- I mean, unless I want to get paid $25 a story doing freelance work in Sioux City, Iowa, or something.

Not that there's anything wrong with Sioux City, Iowa.

It's not what I envisioned when I first got into sports journalism, but I'm finding that there's plenty of opportunities to affect the sort of material that gets published if you're on the editing side. In some cases, the opportunities are better and allow you to be more influential. Plus, most reporters are hacks who eat nachos for dinner, and I don't intend to be one of those guys for a living.

This might be counter-intuitive, but now that I'm not a writer, I'm a lot more conscious and selective about what I want to publish on the Web. Back when I first started blogging, at the tender age of 21, I basically wrote about whatever idea popped up in my head whenever it popped up in my head. Most of the ideas were random -- hence the title of the blog -- but some were personal, and I can honestly say that I spent more time on some of my blogs than I did
with some of my college classes (OK, only the useless ones, like IDS 130 and Political Science 1B).

It's different now. I have a copy editor's mentality. Less is more. Every word has to be there for a reason. I look back at some of the stuff I wrote when I was young, and it elicits the same feeling I get when I look at some of my college pictures.

Burn it.

Beyond that, I've begun to grasp just what exactly this World Wide Web business means. It means anyone in the world can read what you publish. That's an exciting idea, but it's also a disturbing one. By that, I mean it's great to have the freedom to write about whatever you want, uncensored, but that comes at the expense of choosing WHO you want to share your ideas with. Maybe this is the kind of change a man goes through when he lives by himself for nearly four years, but I value most of my thoughts enough that I only share them with a few, select people.

I may not have cherished that idea before, but I do now. That's probably the biggest difference between me before and me now.