It's only once every 4 years that we have a 29^th of February, so I'm going to use it to discuss a bit about what I think it means to blog; What is a blog? Why blog?  Who reads it? Why do people read it?  Why do people read my blog?

Firstly, the easy one : A blog is essentially an online diary.  It's an easy way to write a bit of a diary, with a bit of hyperlinked stuff included. Photos, movies etc when they crop up, but the gist of it is it's a diary.

Why blog?  That's a good one. 

There's many different styles of blogs, from the mundane "what I did today" sort of diary entries, to opinion pieces and rants, collections of links to other people's work, and sometimes writing of documentation etc.  I think the last one is fraught with peril, blogs by their nature are throwaway items, and rarely do they get revisisted and corrected, so using a blog to write documentation is a poor choice. It's the wrong tool! Use a CMS or something more formal for that sort of thing. 

Personally, I try and make my blog a hybrid of most of the above - some 'what I did' stuff, which I expect only interests me (and my mum, if she reads this, I doubt it though! I'd be getting emails with corrections to my grammar if she did, just as well you can't red-pen a blog) although some of it may interest people doing similar things - I think my story is interesting, but that's because it's interesting to me!  I'm sure many people would find it dull at best.  I don't think they'd read it for long if they did so my audience is selective.

So I try and combine a bit of the 'what I've done and am doing' stuff with opinion (It's my blog, you will get my unsanitised opinions) pieces, generally I try to make them positive and I try to, as much as I can, recognise and support the people I know who are doing brave things and helping others etc through my writing here.  If someone questions what I'm doing I generally won't use this blog to moan about it, if I have a bad day or someone gets under my skin I'll generally not blog about it.  You don't want to read about squabbles or misunderstandings or bitchyness, and I don't want to dwell on negative stuff. Sometimes I do, but I try to avoid it.

I also want as many of the riders I work with to blog.  Not everyone understands that what they do may be inspirational, but I think it is.  I love reading Nath's (all too infrequent) entries about how he's improving, and Dino's.  Your stories are interesting, where you're coming from is not where most racing cyclists have come from and your efforts, courage and determination (and failures and rebounds!) show others that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

So it's partially my wanking on about myself, and partially supporting and encouraging those I know.  Many blogs are big on the first bit, and very small on the rest.  This I think is a reflection of character.  The world is a big place and I think it's important to keep that in perspective.  I know my life is somewhat unconventional, and my perspective is a little unique at times, and often quite banal, but I can't tell when it's one or the other, that's for the audience to decide.  To answer the question, my blog is an extroverted diary, and I publish it because I hope it's interesting, I hope it's inspiring in some way to some of you and I think everyone should know what I think about things!  I have an agenda of course, there's things I believe are important to us as a society and things I think deserve to be discussed.  It's not all about me, but my blog is about what I think is important and interesting.  I don't allow anonymous commenting, but members of this website can comment and I don't censor the comments. I would if there was something very offensive in it, but not if someone disagreed with me on something.  I think disagreement is healthy, but it's important to know how to disagree without being disagreeable and without taking disagreement personally. Having anonymous comments means that the ratbag element can comment without accountability.  Not on my turf.

Who reads it?  You do!  Who are you? Some of you are my friends, some are my coaching clients, some are people who don't like me much who are looking for reasons to get angry and/or to try and embarrass me. I'm a target, I'm outspoken enough and sometimes a bit too quick to write and too slow to edit to never make anyone upset.  Some of you are are just interested people with time to kill who stumbled on a link somewhere.  I don't know really who is who or why you read this.  I don't know exactly how many people read this.  There's a few RSS polls that monitor it but I haven't trolled my server logs to really dig into it. 

Does who you are and how many of you there are matter? I think so, but am not obsessed by it. It's good to have some sort of an audience, or the whole thing is pointless.  I want you to read it, or I'd just keep my diary to myself.  So far, it's been fun, and you're still reading.... Thankyou.