Jason Kottke, the high-profile New Yorker blogger and web designer, has quit his job and decided to blog full time last Tuesday.

I believe that he’d be able to pull it off, given that he already has a few hundred “patrons” who probably have contributed enough dollars to exceed my gross income last year. And he’s just into his first of three weeks of solicitation.

The thing is, only a very few people can pull this off. 99.99% of the bloggers out there can’t do that; most don’t have readership that can be measured in the millions. But he is just like most of us bloggers. We all try to balance the demands of our regular jobs with the demands of blogging. Often, the blogging suffers because we need to put food on the table.

This is a sad thing because for most bloggers, blogging is a hobby. Meaning, it is something we do for fun and just because we like it. While I also like my job, other people hate the daily grind of going to the office. It’s not good that we are forced to do something we don’t like instead of pursuing things that make us happy.

Blogging has already been acknowledged as a legitimate media of independent publishing. Jason’s move, while laudable, only serves to highlight the fact that blogging is still a long way to becoming a real profession, along the ranks of musicians, columnists, book authors, and visual artists.