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Mr. Abbott, who lives in Canaan and is helping to create a land trust there, began blogging about 18 months ago when he left a longtime position with The Nature Conservancy to start a private consulting firm. "I just felt that something was missing, aside from a regular paycheck," he said with a laugh. "I found myself working with individuals to preserve their property but not explaining how the past and present and social and natural histories come together and that's stuff I care about and think about." The blog filled that void.
Since then, Mr. Abbott has been writing more than he probably ever imagined. He has a longstanding interest in history, his own family archive and its personal narratives. He attempts to post new content daily and averages two blog entries every three days-though he's on vacation at the moment and is offering some appreciated blogs from the past. Otherwise, he has hardly missed a day-a real accomplishment considering the traveling he does and outdoor hobbies he pursues in addition to working full-time and being a dad to two young children.
"I had been out of the practice of regular writing but I loved the blog and found myself spending more time on it and getting a little less sleep as a result. It was a vehicle that allowed me to do things beyond what I originally thought I would do," he said.
Mr. Abbott began "Walking the Berkshires" with the purposes of expressing his thoughts, providing a forum for issues he is interested in and making connections with people. But his intentions soon grew with the success of the blog and the joy he found in writing for it daily. He is hoping to find a path toward finish some long-abandoned writing projects, including a half-completed novel.
"What the blog is really doing is making me more serious about the larger unwritten projects in my life. What this has told me is that 'Yes, you do actually have the time to do it. I think I will continue to blog and let some of the subjects end up in my fiction as well," said Mr. Abbott, who has published a few short stories but no books-yet.
The late-night blogger spends days at work and early evenings with his family, "so the time I have to compose and write is when they've gone to bed but I think about what I'm going to write all the time. I drive an old truck with no functioning sound system so anytime I'm driving somewhere, it's just me and my head and I don't have the sort of blessing of someone saying, 'Here's your assignment this week.' The ideas just sort of come to me," he said.
Some of his finished entries happen in just 20 minutes of typing after he's been composing them in his head over the course of his day. "I write fast and I'm a good writer and I don't rework it a lot. If it's something that involves a lot of research it may take me several hours," he said.
He also confesses to liking the sense of community fostered by some blogs. He wants his own project to be more than opening his head for the world to see what's inside; he'd like it to be a two-way conduit of information. He likes the comments and e-mails he receives from people and is proud that, though it's fairly low compared to some blogs, he gets about 160 regular readers a day. "I've met some pretty neat people this way," he said.
And he responds to their thoughts through his content choices, essentially letting readers shape some of what he provides. If a subject garners lots of comments and e-mails he may stay on the topic for a few days. If another idea merits a thundering silence from his audience, he may move on more quickly than he would otherwise.
He tries to be disciplined about blogging clichés and limit pastimes such as checking traffic to his site or constantly checking his rating on sites such as www.technorati.com.
Although Mr. Abbott's jobs with The Nature Conservancy in the past and, now, The Trust for Public Land, which manages the Greenprint project, offer him a connection to the issues he cares about, he noted, "I like to separate work from what is clearly a private pursuit even though it blends with my work."
The Greenprint is a joint effort of the Trust for Public and the Cornwall-based Housatonic Valley Association, which, according to HVA's Web site "are working together to initiate a community-based mapping, networking and land conservation process in the Housatonic River watershed in Litchfield County. This process-called greenprinting-seeks to inventory protected open space across the area, and in partnership with local land trusts and government, identify new ways to finance and protect land."
When he began blogging he almost looked at it as an act of blind faith. He would write something and shoot it into cyberspace and hope that someone would read it. "Now it's very clear to me that more people are reading it, linking to it and disagreeing with it too," he said. One of his loftier goals for the blog is to create a dialogue that happens without him-a space where readers are talking to each other in the comments section and existing without his input.
"I don't think I've hit that level yet. Many people comment to me but rarely are they talking to each other. I want to make it something larger than just me. That's sort of hard though because unless you are a very topical blog that provokes strong arguments you tend to get different comments," he said.
"Walking the Berkshires" has become a go-to guide on certain subjects such as a certain shipwreck off the coast of New Jersey where the ship caught fire. He gets lots of people asking him questions and he's starting to be able to help them with the answers or at least point them where to go next. His blog even landed him on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, where he was quoted extensively in an article about new birding technology, after the writer stumbled upon one of his rare birding posts and contacted him about it.
"I'm not an expert on most of these topics but I may be able to help. I think that's one of the things my blog does that others might not," he said. "If you have access to an academic search engine you might get some different data but, most of us, when we want to learn something we go to Google and we type in a few words and see what we come up with," he said. What he didn't say is that most people would rather read something easily digested and written in his friendly, conversational style rather than a peer-reviewed journal's stale prose.
Readers and fellow bloggers must appreciate his efforts because his neophyte endeavor has won three awards, including a prestigious honor from one of his favorite Web blogs, Boston 1775. That Massachusetts based blog focuses on two things narrowly and deeply: that year in American history and the life of 18th-century Colonial children. The man who writes the blog awarded him The Thinking Blogger Award last year, a prestigious honor that gets passed from blogger to blogger
If you win it one year, you get to award it the next year. "It's a sort of award chain letter if you will, but a very respected one," said Mr. Abbott. He won another award about an entry he wrote on invasive species ("I wrote about the ladybugs on my windowsill but I really got into them," he said intensely) and a third from a small blog that simply issues awards annually to its favorites.
He counts about 30 favorites among his often-checked blogs and their subjects range dramatically. "It's amazing because a year ago I couldn't have even named one," he said.
To visit Mr. Abbott's blog go to www.greensleeves.typepad.com/berkshires.
