(last edited on September 20, 2014 at 2:37 pm)
I tweeted this a couple of days ago:
I am going to BLOG MY BUTT OFF for the rest of August to see what happens. MY BUTT. OFF. BUTT-OFF!
The idea of blogging my butt off came after writing about how I had been missing conversation in my life. I’ve been so grimly pre-occupied with making this e-commerce thing work that I’d retreated into myself. It was only after an extended visit from my cousin that I was able to detect what I’d been missing.
Blogging used to be a form of communication for me, especially when I’d first started. Back then, I was largely talking to myself. I tried not to let the awareness that there was an (eep) AUDIENCE change how I wrote, but in more recent years I’d allowed that awareness to transmute into something more complicated. I might call it the “conscientious consideration for the time commitments and interests of a segmented audience”. In other words, I’d worried that what I was writing was too long or too niche, perhaps too repetitive or too introspective. So I started to write less while trying to write “better”, and started to address long-standing usability issues with the existing content. Blogging became part of my job, and in the process I’ve lost the conversational sharing feeling that used to have me writing all the time.
For the remainder of August, I’m going to try to get back to that old conversational model and blog whenever I feel like it, like I am hanging out with friends at a coffee shop and shooting the breeze about what’s going on. Why? No particular reason other than I have a hunch that some important insight will fall out of the experiment.
3 Comments
Your updates are some of the ones I look forward to the most in my rss reader. That sentence is wonky but whatever. I’m saying if you have something on your mind please write more often.
Forget self-editing and blog away. Isn’t the editing part – the conversation – part of what you hope will happen? Readers will help with that – your community. Feels a lot like what you’ve said you loved about your Groundhog Day projects this year – more doing, doing, doing, and less thinking, thinking, thinking.
And I agree with Ron – yours are the first updates I read!
Ron, Betsy: Thanks for the support! I shall do my best.