Clay Shirky has the definitive essay on the subject; spurred partly, I suspect, by the discussions following Steve's post. Jason Kottke's weblogs and power law covers the same ground and has an interesting reading list. I also enjoyed Mark Pilgrim's post.

The whole thing about why isn't my weblog becoming more visible comes up from time to time and let's face it, exercizes most of us at least occasionally.

As someone whose weblog is not by any stretch of imagination setting the Atlantic on fire, here is my take. If you are weblogging, it is going to be very frustrating if you have the expectation that this shit is gonna make you well known. I read somewhere sometime back, that a weblog is a very good way to sustain your existent brand equity through the web. But it is not a medium ideally well suited for developing your brand equity. I tend to agree. Outside of being very, very good, you also need to be very regular in your posting and in the vast majority of cases, have a lot of PR Savvy. Now, you probably already need to do that at work, right? This stuff is supposed to be fun, a creative outlet. Once you start taking it easy, you would realize that it is contributing to your self development in myriad small ways that you did not anticipate earlier.

The other thing that the weblog world rewards is giving back to the community. If you are doing stuff that is useful/helpful to the netizens, it spreads the word. e.g. people like Mark or the boy genius came to the party later and had not gone out of their way to spread the word about their weblog. But they give back a lot and people appreciate that.

But there simply are way too many weblogs out there. And if you let your self actualization needs ride on your weblog, that may turn out to be frustrating. Go out. Enjoy the sun (or the snow, if that is the case..we are expecting 5 inches by the evening). Have a drink. Spend some time writing that book you always want to write.