For the last several years, I've blogged. I'm ending this experiment after much enthusiasm, debate and a hiatus. I didn't start blogging because I thought it was the best thing to happen to media since Gutenberg, nor am I stopping it now because I think blogging is useless.
I'm stopping because being a good blogger is hard work. Personally, I have time for only one all-consuming hobby after my paying job and family responsibilities. I'm moving on to another form of my favorite avocation so I'm not lying on my deathbed some years hence, wondering, "If only I'd ...."
But I'm leaving blogging -- first on the
Lost Remote group blog, and then with Byte Me online -- with these six Blogging Lessons Learned:
Blogs take time. To craft a good post -- one with insight or humor -- requires effort. Blogging is writing, and writing is communication. To communicate well (even in brief), you have to think about what you want to say, put yourself in the head of the person you want to say it to, and then say it well. Crappy writing is crappy blogging. Or a kind of performance art.
Blogs are addictive. There is some bizarre adrenalin high knowing, just knowing, that dates are ticking by without an entry in your blog. Part of this, of course, is due to an inherent flaw in how most blogging tools are structured -- forcing reverse date order. But the last time I ever felt this kind of constant, generalized performance anxiety was when I worked in a broadcast newsroom with a never-ending news hole to fill. You get addicted to beating the dateline deadline. There is no twelve-step program, either.
Blogs are not a new medium. New mechanism is a better phrase. The medium is the Internet (or, more specifically, the Web page). The mechanism is blog authoring tools. Very useful, very cool, and very ubiquitous (unless your service's server goes down). But blogs are not the new papyrus. They're a new way of inscribing the same digital papyrus.
Blogs are not "citizen journalism." Blogs enable citizen journalism. A blog is like a piece of paper. What you put on it -- from journalism to conversation -- is your choice. See the above re: "performance art."
Blogs are rapidly becoming MSM. There. I've said it. Those blogs whose creators have audiences larger than newsletters, specialty magazines and even small-market radio and TV stations are no longer underdog players. They are mainstream media outlets, in a medium -- the Web -- which itself has become mainstream.
Blogs are not mystical and hard to understand. This is the one lesson that businesses which profit from the blogging boom would like you not to learn. They'd rather sell you consulting services on creating a blog (just visit Blogger and get your feet wet), the proper "tone" of a blog (just write the way you talk, but a bit more grammatically), or newsletters, conferences and more. Want to blog? Read other blogs, then start. Blogging is like writing -- as someone once said, the only way to become a good writer is to write. The only way to become a good blogger is to blog.
That said, farewell. Until I start again.
(UPDATE 03/07: This was the final entry in the Byte Me Online blog.)
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