I am relating this to blogs, but it can apply to many other things in life, and in business. In fact, the more I think of it, this really isn’t just about blogs at all. I hope that you can relate to this, and begin to uncover more of your bright ideas.

Do you ever have a great idea that you just have to share with the world … or at least the people who read your blog? I do, and I find myself jotting down a note about it. I am old school, so I end up with a squillion pages of notes stacked on my desk. Some of them make it to my handy dandy little notebook, and a decent number even make it to my list of draft copies here on my blog.

It is great to have a list of ideas for future articles to present to the world … or at least the people who read my blog. So, in those moments of inspiration, it is best to take some notes and remember to get back to it later. After all, it is often hard to be astonishingly brilliant on cue, and who wants to publish something that is less than “astonishingly brilliant”? Not this guy, but I still do it anyway.

I read a lot of blogs, and I gather a lot of great ideas from them. There is a lot of amazing talent out there on the Internet, sitting at their computer every day to blog about what they know, what they think, what they do, and what they sell. A few of those squillion blogs will become popular with readers, but how?

It is easy for me to answer why I read the blogs I read. They help me to keep my thinking sharp with new ideas. My brain needs a lot of daily exercise to keep up with my industry.

It seems easy to define why the popular blogs I read are successful at their mission, but harder when I turn it around and look at my own work. I hope you can relate to this. I find that it is always harder to scrutinize myself than to scrutinize others.

Even if you are the least tech-savvy person since my mother, it is clear that you will see this company popping up in more places during 2011. The name, “Disqus” (pronounced as discuss) is spread far and wide across the Internet, and its exposure is growing quickly as top tech and news blogs implement the service.

In November 2010 TechCrunch reported that there were over 500,000 communities using Disqus for more than 160 million conversations between 18 million profiles. According to Quantcast, Disqus is moving up quickly. Maybe you are not so sure about its importance just yet, but I am, and I want to share why Disqus is quickly climbing my list of favorite social networking tools.

Have you ever noticed that when you visit a blog, you generally only look through the most recent articles? It is pretty common that upon visiting a blog’s home page, people will just scan through a few items and see if there is something they want to read. In the blogging world, it is often assumed that newer is better, but this is quite often not the case. It is just more visible.

I am guilty of looking at the date something was published. I am not sure why in some cases, but I guess I am just so accustomed to seeing a date on blog articles. I suppose it is just one more way that people can feel that they are getting the latest and greatest news. A reality check for bloggers and readers alike can come in the form of these two little questions:

Blogging from experience may not seem all that revolutionary. After all, I suspect that if you write a blog, you probably already understand this. It is best to blog things you know, and know well. I want to drive the point a bit further and inspire you to use your experience, and to pull from the experience of others around you.

I will tell you where I find much of my inspiration, in hopes that it may help your creative process. When I reflect on my work, it is pretty easy to find blogging material directly from my daily life. I blog about things I know, but not just something I pulled out of the back reaches of my mind. I blog about things I have actually encountered … usually recently. Some of the best stuff comes from questions people ask me. When I hear something a few times, I start to think to myself “I’ll bet there are a lot of other people who would like to know more about this, too.” A great benefit of blogging this way is that it becomes “evergreen” blogging material which is useful for more than just the moment. It often becomes something people can look back into my archives and find useful months, or even years later.