Blogging

18th October 2009 1:40:46 by Richard Bennett

One of the problems with having a lot of client work, is the lack of time left for self promotion and community interaction, namely blogging.

When blogging took off back in 2003, part of our daily work routine would be reading and writing blogs. This got the company I was working for out into the space we were working in, and brought knowledge of the bleeding edge back into the company. In retrospect, the writing probably did more for me personally than for the company, as the company eventually went under, and yet my posts are still out there on the web with my name on them. Not that I got too much out of it that I wouldn't have without the company's support, as I was already blogging before I joined them, and may well have had the same interests even if I hadn't.

The impact of reading blogs however was even more distorted. We were in the blogging and web content space, the bleeding edge at the time, and there was a mass of blog traffic about the technology behind blogging. At one point I was reading ~300 blogs, it was insane. And while some of these weren't blogging related, I was only reading them because I already had a daily routine for blog reading. As the technology of blogging and microcontent started to stabilise and I went on to other ventures, it became difficult to justify spending the time just reading, and I eventually went cold turkey. What I failed to see was how the technology I was working with had distorted my perceived need for, as No.5 would say "input!".

Since then, portals have begun to restore themselves to their rightful place in the world, and email has prevented yet another potential breakout. These days I read one portal site regularly to get my updates, and subscribe to RSS feeds of several mailing lists to get the rest. I rarely keep up with them, and I skim them about once a week. RSS has become the tool that it was designed to be, a pull syndication technology, nothing more, nothing less. And as we were all hoping all those years ago, we can now apply filters to make sure we only get the information we want, such as monitoring the web for mentions of our products. Most other stuff these days you can find via a portal's feed or a syndicated link blog.

Aside from time, the other reason why my blogging is so irregular, is client confidentiality agreements. There's a wealth of blogging and research material in client projects, yet in most cases it is best kept inside the organisation.

So more blogging? Sure. I'll sign up for a bit of that.