Blogging

I think it was Andy C who first mentioned to me that one of the golden rules of blogging was never to apologise or justify your reasons for not blogging. I guess it’s because so many people do it so often that it becomes tedious. But my blogging output has been so woeful in the past year or so that I thought it worth mentioning at least one reason why and what I might do to encourage myself to write more useful posts.

I’m pretty sure it was Thomas Presslie who first implied to me that blogging was over! I couldn’t see it myself but Thomas has always been more of a futurist than me and has more idea of what’s going on amongst the cool kids. Sure enough, I spend very little time reading blog posts myself these days – probably even less time than I do writing them – and I detect that a lot of people’s blogging frequency has dropped. I suspect that one of the big reasons is Twitter. We all only have so much spare capacity once the mundane realities of normal life are dealt with (think cooking, cleaning, ironing, working for a living, bills, accounts, blah, blah, blah, blah) and so as we pay more attention to things like Twitter and also, at least in my case, increasing volumes of mail then it becomes more difficult to find the time or energy to write a semi-decent post. I probably shouldn’t be so specific about Twitter. The fact is it’s so easy to be over-loaded with information these days from various delivery channels.

Where this has specifically affected me is that if I want to write about a conference or a post I’ve seen then the likelihood is that I’ve used up all my free time at the conference itself twittering away when in the past I would have found a quiet corner and written a blog post. These days, I try to write a post after the event but it loses it’s point as it becomes less current and just becomes a dull chore which means it sits there in my to do list staring at me as I stare back disinterestedly.

There are also issues around writing technical posts. Sometimes there’s simply so much client-specific content to what I’m doing in the real world that I really can’t blog about it directly so you need to come up with a generic test case and those things take time too, on top of the actual work! However, I have missed writing technical posts and I think it’s good for both me and others if I do. So here’s what I’m going to try for a while ….

– When conferences are coming up or I’m attending them, I’m just going to use Twitter and you can follow that stuff at @orcldoug. No more conference reports (sorry conference organisers) because I don’t think people care too much about them anyway and when your own diary is boring you, that can’t be a good thing 😉

– Set a lower bar for what is worth blogging about. I’ve done this before by blogging some really basic stuff that I’m then surprised to find that people found useful. There’s something I’m trying to reach here between writing proper White Papers and tweeting 140 characters. The former take time and energy to appear and a blog isn’t the place for them and the latter is not something I’m very good at saying anything useful in!

– Eventually I’ll get that WordPress migration done. I did make a start and there are ways of doing it but, like most of these things, it’s just tricky enough and will take just long enough that there’s other things I’d rather do with my time for now.

It’s not like a big master-plan, just me wanting to start blogging a bit more so trying a different approach. Let’s see how it goes.