If Your Blog Died Today…. What Would It Be Remembered For?

Written on February 18th, 2009 at 12:02 am by Darren Rowse

If your blog were to die today - how would it be remembered?

Here’s a little 2 part exercise that might be fun (although slightly morbid) - and hopefully insightful. You’ll need half an hour or so to do it properly.

1. Write an obituary for your blog 10 years in the future

Project yourself forward 10 years, imagine that at that point you decide to end your blog having achieved everything that you want to achieve with it and write a short obituary about your blog as you’d like other people to have seen it to that point.

Keep in mind that your blog has been as successful as it can be and you’re ending it at the peak of its game.

• What do you want people to say about your blog?
• How do you hope it will have been perceived?
• What will people miss about it the most?
• What ground has it broken?
• What has it achieved?
• How has it helped people?

Take 10 minutes to write this obituary and dare to dream big.

2. Write an obituary for your blog as it stands today

OK - back to the present. Lets just say that you blog ended today. Perhaps it was hacked, perhaps you just decided to delete it or perhaps your server died and you didn’t have a backup - the reason doesn’t matter - the exercise remains the same.

Write an obituary for your blog as you think others see it now.

• What would they say about it?
• What would people miss about it?
• What has it achieved?
• How has it fulfilled a need or service in people’s lives.
• What ground has it broken?

This exercise is one I did a few years back in another context and it was a powerful and motivating exercise. The key to it is to look at the two obituaries (the one you want people to write in the future and the one that people would write now - and to compare them and to sit with the differences.

The reality is that most of us have not yet achieved what we want to achieve with our blogs - however the question is, are we moving in the right direction to make our dreams a reality?

Many bloggers that I talk with have grand dreams and hopes - but their day to day blogging doesn’t take them closer to them.

Once you’ve compared your two obituaries - the next step is to start to put together some concrete steps that will enable you to move from the present reality to the dream for your future. These sorts of dreams don’t just happen - rather they are the result of taking daily steps towards your goals.

If you’d like to share your obituaries (or at least what you discovered in writing them) in comments below I’d be interested to see what you come up with.