Tonight, my girlfriend and I watched Julie & Julia. The movie is based on Julie Powell’s year blogging and cooking her way through Julia Child’s cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. At the beginning of the film, Powell’s blog is slow. Her mother is her only commentator and reader. Worse, her mother discourages her.

I reflect on my own blog: seventeen weeks, twenty posts, 339 views, two comments from friends. Unlike Powell, my parents have encouraged. (My mom actually recommended I watch the film and got me Julia Child’s autobiography for Christmas last year.) Like Powell, so too has my girlfriend and my good friends.

All the same, running a blog is tough. Updating it is tedious and time consuming—especially when I, like Powell, have a day job. Readers are scarce. Rewards are few.

Is there anybody out there?

I often feel like Powell, asking myself, is it worth it? Will I ever catch a break, develop a regular enough readership? My words enter the digital black hole we call cyberspace, where little is truly seen but every thought, every letter, every phrase, every photo, for better or worse, becomes immortal. I, like Roger Waters, ask, “Is There Anybody Out There?”

I remind myself why I write this: Blogging, for me, is as much about expressing my ideas and promoting my novels as it is a series of therapeutic exercises for accepting my life as an autoimmune patient and a political iconoclast.

Blogging in the Age of Information Overload

Today marks exactly four months since I started this blog. I’m nowhere near ready to give up.

But times have changed since Powell blogged in 2002. People have never been so connected and consumed so much information. Americans alone digest 33 gigabytes of media every day. One cannot be just another Information Age culinary dropout or just another Web 2.0 desk-chair pundit.

What, then, must a man to do stand out in an age of narcissism? What can he do to bring order when so much of the world and so many people’s lives (including his own) seem to be chaos?