I was a blogger

Back in 2004, I opened my first blog. The decision I made then changed my life for ever.

I discovered at this time how powerful conversations could be, specially with complete strangers. Meanwhile, I also found out I was not a gifted writer but it didn’t matter ; for once in my life, I was creating things for the pleasure of doing so.

Writing when you know someone’s going to read you is a powerful motivation. You can’t scamp, they’ll see it, let you know you’re lazy and you don’t want this to happen. You definitively have to work your ass off on every idea, every post, keeping in mind everything you write is going to last forever.

Since then, I’ve been writing thousands of posts on my blog, and may be even more that remained unpublished, building one article at a time a solid and pretty loyal audience. I’ve met tons of people, some of them who became later good friends or even business partners. The traffic generated was decent — Yes, my French is definitively better than my English, it helps! — and some articles have been eventually featured in major French papers.

I learnt then that what I was writing, specially on entrepreneurship, could have a huge influence on some people. I remember receiving emails from very excited “kinds of fans” thanking me for an idea or an advice, telling me how well it worked for their startup or project. I came to realize then some people were desperate enough to follow what I was suggesting without filtering it to take into account their own situation. A good advice in my case can become a terrible one without context. It really scared me to see how powerful were some articles and their influence on readers.

With the Social Media rise, conversations on my blog started to slow down while the traffic was increasing dramatically. Sharing had never been easier at this time and readers were pushing my notes, sometimes without even reading them… but the quality of the interactions paradoxically faded. We were not really starting conversations anymore, but pushing new content “outside” instead. Thus, I was slowly loosing my blogging mojo…

I’ve always seen a blog like a living-room, where I could share discussions with friends and neighbors while drinking a glass of wine. I guess this time is over now or may be my expectations have changed .

That’s the reason why, last week, I decided to put my blog offline. It took me months to make this decision, but I know now this end was inevitable. So be it.

I will never stop writing. I consider it like my personal time and somehow my most powerful therapy. I just need to find new ways in succession to 10+ years of blogging, ways that will bring me back to roots, to conversations and beautiful encounters.

One thing is for sure: I was a blogger…