I still remember how surprised my friends and business colleagues were, roughly 15 years ago, when I told them that I had decided I had to devote an extra hour of work each day to go through all of my e-mail. “Why would you want to spend that much time dealing with something as irrelevant as e-mail?” they asked. “And how could you get that much email?”

By today’s standards, I really wasn’t getting all that much e-mail at the time, and I didn’t handle it very efficiently. Among other things, I actually devoted five or ten minutes to composing long, thoughtful replies to anyone who cared enough to send me an e-mail. Today, 15 years later, I get hundreds of emails each day, and my spam filters (which include some 2,000 hand-crafted “rules” in my Apple Mail program) delete most of it; the legitimate e-mails that survive this gauntlet generally get a very quick, hurried response. But hardly anyone complains, because now everyone is spending an hour a day, if not more, dealing with the overwhelming torrent of email from friends, family, and work colleagues.

But for the past year, I’ve had a different complaint: I feel that I should be devoting an extra hour of work each day blogging — in addition to the hour coping with e-mail. And my friends and colleagues say, “Why would you want to spend that much time doing something so irrelevant and narcissistic? Couldn’t you be spending your time doing something more productive and worthwhile?”

Well, maybe so … but I’m still trying to figure out how I can squeeze out that extra hour each day. Let’s face it, this is hard work: it’s really tough finding an hour to blog each day. It’s not as if I have any spare time during the day, so the only obvious time for blogging is either early in the morning, or late at night. I wish I could get along on three or four hours of sleep per night, the way some people do; I wish I could get up at 4 AM and work productively until midnight. I’ve tried, but I just can’t; I do get up even earlier than when I was in my twenties, but there’s that hour of e-mail work facing me, plus another hour of reading Internet headlines, digesting about a hundred unread blog postings collected by NetNewsWire, and gulping down a quick breakfast.

So that leaves the late evening — like now, when I’m writing this posting — after I’ve wrapped up my work for the day, and when I’m thinking that I’d rather settle down with a glass of wine and watch Jon Stewart lampoon the politicians in Washington. By now, I’m pretty tired, and I’m tempted to just shrug and mutter to myself, “Why bother? My brain is mush, and I can’t think of anything interesting to say … and anyway, who would care?”

And that, I think, is the ultimate question about blogging: who cares? There are 6+ billion people on the planet, most of whom have no idea who I am, and who are probably completely disinterested in anything I have to say about anything — so why bother? And even assuming that a few dozen (or hundred, or thousand) people do bother reading a blog entry, where’s the payoff? What’s the return on investment? Wouldn’t it make more sense to spend that hour doing “real” work, whatever that might be?

Well, maybe so … but the nice thing about the world of Web 2.0 and blogging is that you can tell whether anyone is paying attention. There are tools and services like Technorati, Feedburner, and OpenTracker that (for a nominal cost, or no cost at all) will tell you how many people are subscribing to your blog, how many are visiting each day, and how many other blogs have linked to your blog. So if you are narcissistic — and let’s face it, all of us are to some extent — you can decide whether you want to continue blogging if, after a year or so, you find that absolutely nobody has bothered to read a single word you’ve written.

And I have to admit that I put myself in that category. According to the “dashboard” statistics on the WordPress website that I use to compose these blog entries, I’ve created 242 blog postings since mid-April of last year, and I’ve gotten 134 comments from various people around the world. I have about 370 regular subscribers, and I get about 400 visitors to my blog each day, which is certainly not a huge number — but it’s greater than zero. If it was zero, or close to it, I suspect I would have found something better to do with my time.

But that doesn’t mean I can calculate the ROI associated with the time I’ve put into this effort; indeed, I would have a hard time identifying any specific job, or client, or revenue-generating contact that could be connected directly to my blog. Like many other bloggers, I can offer vague opinions about the increased exposure, publicity, exposure, and reputation that may be associated with my blogging; but I can’t prove it. In the short term — and possibly even in the long term — it’s quite possible that I could generate much more profit by spending that extra hour a day writing a book, or doing some traditional consulting work for a traditional client … or just getting an extra hour’s sleep per night.

Ultimately, I suspect that bloggers are driven by the same motivation as writers — except that writers have traditionally needed a publisher to get their words in front of an audience, whereas bloggers can upload their own words to the Internet without any assistance (or control, editing, censorship, delays, or other bureaucracy). Anyone who considers himself a “writer” today may have hopes of writing a best-seller, but deep in his heart, he knows that his odds of becoming the next Tom Clancy or Stephen King are just about zero. I’ve written 27 books, 550+ articles, and a couple hundred blog postings — but like most writers, I have no illusion about being recognized as the next Shakespeare, Tolstoi, or Hemingway.

Even without fame or fortune, there’s a basic reality: every writer, and every blogger, wants an audience … desperately wants someone to read, and validate, whatever he has to say. And even in the absence of an audience, they write because they have to. If that doesn’t resonate with you, then perhaps you weren’t meant to blog … or write. That’s okay — there’s more than enough noise out there. According to Technorati, there are 57 million blogs in existence at this point — and I suspect that 56.9 million aren’t being read by anyone other than the author, and never will be. That’s okay, too, because the other 100,000 will be found, by a random audience of people we may never meet in person, and who might never post a comment on our blogsite. But thanks to Technorati, FeedBurner, and OpenTracker, we know they’re listening.

At the end of the day, writers write. And bloggers blog. That’s what it’s all about.

I still have to figure out how I’m going to find that extra hour each day, but at least I’ve reminded myself why I’m doing it.

P.S. Sometimes I find a little time to do something other than working and blogging. I spent last weekend visiting family members in Salt Lake City; if you’re interested in seeing the 250 photos that survived the editing process, you can find them here on Flickr.