Blog Blahs
I’m sorry I missed most of Thursday’s blog meeting about the blog blahs because I think part of why I haven’t been posting as much as I used to is because I have the blog blahs. I had kinda a blah day, a day I often call a slow day. I have a lack of energy, it takes me twice as long to do anything, and I can’t quite seem to get my mind in gear. I blame that on why I was very late to the meeting. By the time I arrived, though, Lisa Williams, who’s moderating the session, had a nice list of causes I could copy down:
- too many blogs
- $#%$ audience [too bad I missed that bit because I’d like to know what $#%$ really means]
- self consciousness
- work vs. professional
- blogging is so much better before you realize anyone is realizing [maybe that should be “anyone is blogging” or “anyone is reading” … ?]
- resistance from others about using “their” place in a new and unfamiliar way
- inability to separate social roles (what your family sees v. friends, colleagues, life subgroups) so you resort to only reporting things you would report to everyone on the planet.
- bullying/panopticon society/junior high
- “I could write about my boss, because my boss didn’t know how to use his computer!”
- no longer any security via obscurity (not that there ever really was any)
- perfectionism — don’t have time to do something thoughtful or new
- “big insightful things are overrated”
- assumptions about what blogging is (short, long, has links, doesn’t have links, certain volume/quality, etc)
- The tools shape how you write or shape your expectations about HOW you should write (twitter vs. conventional blogging tools)
- blogs that jumped the shark — run out of ideas
- blogging creates intolerance towards rest periods that would allow “idea refueling” [I especially feel this one. There’s a lot of pressure to make a certain number of posts (like one a day, several a day, etc.), whether you have anything to say or not, especially for people who get into a pattern, then begin blogging less.]
- getting obsessed with/addicted to an increasing level of traffic or interaction and allowing that to shape the process in negative ways.
- tools themselves may be stifling (why does everything have to have a title?)
- conventional tools, however, were probably an improvement over previous tools in terms of format flexibility
- tools have stalled [Heh. Long live Frassle! Lisa expounded on this item by pointing to some lists we developed years ago about features we wanted to see in blog platforms and how to our knowledge, no one has implemented any of those features.]
- procrastinating by thinking about the perfect blog tool “)
- the longer you avoid adding to a blog the larger the resistance gets
- problems of success
- “Is this on topic?”
- business–inability to reveal cdertain things publicly
- Stifling
- Successive risk: you may receive things that you enjoy after taking risks–which may make you risk-averse –
- Twitter is the new IRC channel
This discussion kinda points to the theme I’ve noticed on the Web about how people who used to be very active online aren’t as active as they once were and this decline in activity is effecting the overall quality of many services and perhaps the Internet as a whole. I read a bit about changes in reddit the other day. (I can’t find the link. I’lll get it later.) Lisa has some statistics from the first BloggerCon back in 2003 showing how active the bloggers were. She joked during the meeting that it was easy to put those numbers together then because you could count the bloggers on one hand. If someone ran the same numbers for the same bloggers today, what would they find? Would the decrease in output Hugh MacLeod noted be visible? How visible? How much have these numbers changed?
October 12th, 2007 at 8:42 am
Yesterday was also a blah day for me. I thought about e-mailing you to motivate myself to go to blog group, but I guess that would not have helped ;-). Perhaps, we need a blog blahs support group.