I'm actually about to do this. I have a bunch of first posts so far. But with a blog, the expectation is very similar: If I put in the effort to write (elaborate) blog posts, I expect some kind of return (views, maybe even comments).

I don't want to put private thoughts in my blog. And not all thoughts are thought through.

I want to use this blog as a recycling container for comments and ideas I post in communities. But it's far less personal than my journal.

I dunno, I have a blog, but I have no stats and no comment box, and I'm pretty sure my most frequent reader is myself.

But it really does help to write down all the things, even if the only audience is future-you.

future-you, I like this. I recently stumbled upon futureme.org It's a service you can use to send yourself an email in, say, 5 years. Around christmas, I wrote myself an email* to read in 10 years. There's something quite intriguing about making a bunch of predictions.

[*]: That email actually only contains a sentence: "Hey, here's something you need to read today. Search your journal for $RANDOM_UNIQUE_STRING and you'll find an entry written 10 years ago for you by your former self."

Do you put in any effort to make it readable for others? I imagine this is a significant part of blogging.

My personal blog gets very little traffic but I love going back and reading my old posts from 10 years ago. To me it is a very similar behavior to looking back at old photos I have taken.

Posts don't have to be well-written to mean something in the future in the same way that mediocre photos can carry quite a bit of feeling and emotion when you look at them after some years.

Some systems allow you to have user groups and to limit your posts to those groups.

Make a group "private thoughts" and only put yourself and your mom/wife/cats in it.