Why haven't I been blogging?

Lately I keep logging into Blogger, half starting a post and giving up again. Not because I'm having technical troubles (strangely that always seems to drive me on - see the length of my MSc blog for evidence of that). It's not because I've also been doing work blogging on this account (for SUNCAT and UKSG) although that comes into it. I think mostly it's because I've become very blurry about all the lines marking out different areas of my life which means I have no idea what I should be blogging about.

Going back a good 5 years I was blogging about personal stuff with random little brain outpourings that very few people actually read and most of those were people I knew. The first blog I wrote wasn't even on a blogging service but was a sqonky little home HTMLed little pink webpage. And now? Now I'm on Blogger and if that's not the definition of search optimised for blogging I don't know what is. Not only that but when I update my blog it gets about a bit - it publishes to its own feeds, it's feeds into my webpage (also linked to Twitter, Flickr etc) it feeds into my Facebook profile, and by extension people read that I've made updates in their Facebook feeds, their feedreaders and some of them get an email. So I have readers. Not a massive fanbase of course but lots of people I know will know when I make an update and that's some social pressure.

Indeed I'd go further, it's not just that people I know well get updated about these posts since Facebook is super insidious (though generally wonderful) and so those people include all of my close family, most of my school friends, most of my uni friends, most of my work colleagues (past and present), lots of friends from belly dancing, family friends, people from my MSc course and the like. It's a big scattergun mix from young students and recent students through to older and senior post holders all round the place. And that makes me seriously wonder about posting anything super personal or super polictical or... well basically anything that I wouldn't shout in a crowded room of friends or employers. And that's a tad limiting psychologically.

It's a real conundrum and I'm still brewing on it in the same way I'm still getting used to having all my bookmarks on del.icio.us - do I really want friends and colleagues to know which bloggers I'm reading? Do they want to know? It may not be a problem when it's a library or tech thing I'm bookmarking but what about sex bloggers? Job ads? Political groups? On the one hand I've always felt very happy being open about everything but there is a big leap between taking the time to Google me vs having my every move thrust in your face when you log into Facebook or your email. And the option to disentangle everything would be to laugh in the face of Web 2.0 functionality... so...

What to do? And what to blog?