To answer Lorelle's question on whether I'm a traffic hound or a blog authority. I am neither and I am both.

That's the deal when you run a personal commentary blog like mine. In some ways you know that whatever you write should be taken as seriously as yesterday's page 6 column in your local newspaper. Other times, you want whatever you write to mean as much to people as the front page headliners that covers all the major newspapers.

But at the end of the day, because whatever you write will always be a wide range of topics, you're going to look like the weekly magazines people pick up whenever they are interested or ignore when there is nothing good on it.

Gone were the days when blogging was all about the simple things in life. When all that mattered was you, what you wanted to say and whoever bothered to read let alone comment. Now we try to focus on being good at something so that we can keep the people that read interested in whatever we're writing. Now we focus on trying to build a "loyal readership" out of our viewers for the sake of reasons that still elude me.

To us normal bloggers that aren't on the frontlines of technology or have nothing remarkable to offer except for our two cents of ideas and our undiluted expression of our own personal thoughts about ourselves, is the quest for a higher pagerank and more money through ads that important to us? Is it really benefiting the rest of us by being served the mish-mashed, rehashed thoughts and paid opinions? All for the sake of trying to cash in on the latest fad in blogging that everyone misunderstands but think they do anyway.

Nothing is that easy, especially if you want to sustain it on a long term. Are you seriously going to think that your blog will be here in the next 5 years? Do you seriously think that your product has enough business model to sustain itself through the periods when there are downtimes? Have you even considered the fact that placing ads on your blog constitutes to running a business and therefore has to be treated in the same way as an actual business?

Blogs may have evolved with the times to give people more than just a way to write about your day, but the purpose of a blog still remain the same. It's to express thoughts and ideas that would otherwise be unheard off when you scream about it to your wall at night. Marketing a product and earning some change on the sidelines is one of the fringe benefits some of us can have, but not at the cost of what still matters – what you write and who you are.

I don't think there is any price to pay to sell that off. At least not if you really want to keep the people from coming back day after day.