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This afternoon my long time friend Bobby an I sat down an had a few drinks at our local pub.  After chatting about the usual turn of events the direction of our conversation quickly steered towards my blog.  Bobby had a plethora of questions about my blog, and me being the uber environmental geek I’m was more then eager to share my blogging life story with him.

Now in my third month blogging, I’ve had my share of ups and downs.  At times I feel like no one is even reading my blog (but hey I guess your probably reading this right now).  But I’ve also had some blogging success stories.  My post How to Make Fertilizer With Beer was incredibly successful, and has now been viewed by over 3,000 people.  Just the other day I received my 10,000th unique visitors which was almost as exciting as the time I figured out how porn could save the rain forest.

Blogging has also come at a price to me.  The obvious costs associated with buying a domain name, hosting the blog.  But also the cost of my time, my girlfriend hates my blog because it takes time away from our relationship.  She refers to it as my child, and most likely plans to destroy it by any means possible.  Likewise I’ve only received $8 so far in revenue, if you consider the fact that I’ve probably put an average of 20 hours per week into my blog for the last three months that means I’m literally making pennies an hour.  At that rate those poor people in China make far more then I do.  But…

Blogging has also been an incredible experience for me.  I’ve become incredibly passionate about my blog, and devote copious amounts of time to spreading word of my blog because I truly believe I offer something valuable to my readers.  The frustrating part is I want my blog to grow, and I want it to grow right now!  After all the green message is a noble one, and I want to share it with as many folks as possible.  But the thing about blogging is it takes time for your blog to really explode.  Like a few years.

As the beer flowed my conversation with Bobby deepened.  Ultimately the question became why do you blog?  To this question I didn’t really have a simple answer lined up.  I mean after all there are a number of reasons I blog.  I started to formulate an answer to Bobby’s question in my beer saturated head.  In the end my answer went something like this…

I blog because I enjoy to write.  I write about what I truly believe in…making a positive impact on our planet.  The thing is I’m by no means an environmental saint, rather the site serves as a medium for me to express my trials and tribulations with leading a green lifestyle.  I know there are other people out there like me, who want to go “green” but are finding it at times difficult to accomplish.  This site is for us, but the thing that sets my site apart from all those other cookie-cutter sites out there is the writing.  Tree Hugger dot com for instance, its owned by the Discovery Channel, and churns out 16 posts per day.  Their top concern is the bottom line, not the environment.  If you browse their site you’ll notice they define being “green” as consuming green products.  The pathway to “green” involves making life changes, not buying more junk we don’t need.  And that’s where Vegthreads dot org comes in, we provide people with ridiculous how-to’s such as how to make sandals with an old tire that are entertaining, an environmentally friendly at the sametime.  No matter how big your pocket book is I believe you can contribute to the green revolution, don’t let outlets like Tree Hugger dot com convince you need to buy $300 lawn chairs made from Bamboo to truly to be a greenie.  Being green is fun, and so is my blog.  We bring the two together, and offer the reader something of value.

As I downed another shot my environmental blog rant had come to an end.  I felt relieved, I was glad i expressed my grief at mainstream media outlets who contributors are the same bastard that are putting our environment in a bad boat.  The good thing is somewhere in that rant I found the direction I would like to take this blog,  the best part is I think that direction was the direction I was heading in all along.