cc licensed flickr photo shared by Chandra Marsono
Despite Cole’s assertion I have never made a rule about “blogging about not blogging.” This was actually something I heard at a presentation last February at Northern Voice as more of an observation of how often we start a post by “I am sorry I have not blogged I a long time…” or “It’s been so long since I blogged…” Whomever said that made the extension that much of twitter is about tweeting abut tweeting or not tweeting.
But is it really new?
I can recall writing a few hand written letters, “I am sorry I have not written since last summer…” or we call someone and say, “Wow, it has been 3 months since I called…”
Maybe I should be talking about not talking.
What was my point?
Despite my convictions that blogging is not dead , it sure seems like a lot of people represented my feeds in me reader… are not writing much.
Now before my friends and colleagues reach for the “I’m sorry blog post” my aim is not to shame people into a post. I do miss the rich interchanges that seemed to be common 3 years ago before nearly everyone dropped it mostly for sending status messages. What you do is up to you, and not blogging is a fine choice, as long as you are doing something good in the world. Or at least, you are Doing No Harm.
I have as much fun and gain as much from twitter than the next guy/gal, but when I look in the long run, all that stuff is smoke blown away. There are no tracks, no record, no accumulation of my experience. Twitter lets your old tweets fall of the table. I really resonate with the spirit Jon Udell describes as this process of “narrating the work we do” via blogs– and that is not harnessed by a stream of tweets.
Thus I have no need to apologize to some nebulous audience because I write directly for me– as this place becomes my growing (foil ball?) track record, one that I control, maintain, cultivate, curate. It goes way beyond the “portfolio” mindset of tossing artifacts into a dossier; the reflection, the emotional outbursts, the descriptions of what worked, what didn’t — is my body of work and of ideas.
Maybe its better that fewer people are blogging- less for me to read? Don’t blog, go off and tweet into the wind. Good luck making some sense of that scattered bit.
cc licensed flickr photo shared by hey mr glen
It leads back to my very first post 6+ years ago– I Blog Therefor I Am which was the first of may titles that play on a pun, but it still rings true– I Blog and Therefore I Continue to Be?
C-D-Blog?
D Blog S A B-S Blog.
O, S N-D!
And see, Cole- I trash my own “rules”- maybe worse than Blogging about Not Blogging is Blogging about Blogging.
“I’m sorry …” to have misrepresented what I thought I recall as one of your rules! I think what you are saying here is something I am working through (yet again) … all the chatter in the twitter space gives me a place to burst ideas and almost presses me to work harder at my “real” posts. Not that working harder at writing is a bad thing. I think having an easy way to express what is happening in the moment has taken some of the edge off the blog.
“I’m not dead yet, I don’t want to go on the cart” comes to mind.
All of the status updates will not give one the potential for full reflection like a blog post does, but in lots of ways (if the data sticks) it still can remind you of where you were and what you were thinking about. Here’s the crazy thing — yesterday I started carrying my analog journal with me again … I didn’t write in it, but I had it with me. Perhaps I am just a bit conflicted (maybe we all are) about where I want to be. Or maybe we are all just really busy and making time to write complete thoughts is eluding us. No matter, no apologies — I’m still on the bus.