Blogging and Obligations

February 10, 2005

Cameron Moll, in a recent iStock­Photo inter­view expressed his thoughts about blogging:

I’d love to say I blog merely because I enjoy it. I do enjoy it. But with a fam­ily and plenty of other oblig­a­tions, that isn’t always the case.

Per­son­ally I couldn’t have said it bet­ter, but his words are cer­tainly the sen­ti­ment of sev­eral blog­gers who take time out of their busy lives to blog. It’s one thing when you’re shar­ing infor­ma­tion about hav­ing a cup of cof­fee at Star­bucks, it’s another when you’ve opted to share your method­olo­gies and the­o­ries on a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject. The post about hav­ing an espresso might take you any­where from 10 to 15 min­utes to pub­lish. In the­ory it might be inter­est­ing to those who know you well or feel they share cer­tain sim­i­lar­i­ties to you, but to most peo­ple, read­ing about your espresso expe­ri­ences might be as dull as a rusted switchblade.

How­ever, when you’ve researched a topic on how “Automa­tion Will Kill Us All” you’ve most likely put time and effort into research­ing your topic and mak­ing sure your points are valid and read­able. These kinds of posts spark more inter­est because you can tell the writer, or in this case the designer, really went out on a limb to express their thoughts and the­o­ries to their readers.

It takes time to develop coher­ent thought and even more so when you’re try­ing to edu­cate your read­ers about an idea, the­ory, method or obser­va­tion, some­thing with sub­stance. When you’ve got other respon­si­bil­i­ties that man­age to take up about 99.9% of your time it becomes that much more dif­fi­cult to set aside time to blog, or main­tain your pres­ence. Your hope is that those who opt to add your site to their grow­ing list of feeds will read your new mate­r­ial despite the fact you might not post on a daily basis. 

6 comments

Right on.

I’m work­ing on a post that’s more in depth and requires a good amount of fore thought. I enjoy read­ing about oth­ers’ viwe­points and ideas about how they work. Hon­estly, I don’t rec­og­nize how much effort it took to write untill I write some­thing with more substance.

I might try ana­log bloging to get my ideas out when I’m not in front of a com­puter, then post the word for word con­ver­sion. Some­times it’s too easy to start a post and never fin­ish it, but if it’s in ink the page will need to be completed.

by Mike on February 10, 2005 at 12:42 pm. Reply #

Some­times I think of a topic to write about, and then I think to myself “Nah, every­one already knows about that! I wouldn’t be adding any­thing new.

Then I read about how no one knows about the Unsharp Mask fil­ter. On one hand, I see that I should not be sec­ond guess­ing myself on such top­ics. On the other hand, seri­ously, I thought every­one knew that already.

by Max on February 10, 2005 at 5:24 pm. Reply #

I tend to take the lazy approach, and just write what I’m thinking/feeling at the time. I don’t take my time, I don’t search for the right words, I just let it go. That’s just my style. Your style is more care­ful, thought­ful, elo­quent. You make blog­ging a sci­ence and art form, whereas I tend to just see what hap­pens. I hope to one day mature enough, some­how, that I can write as well as you do.

by Matt Burris on February 10, 2005 at 7:15 pm. Reply #

True. Often I ask myself whether it’s more impor­tant to research and write or to just sim­ply write.

by chopsocky on February 10, 2005 at 10:33 pm. Reply #

Couldn’t be told bet­ter. In my case, hav­ing done the blog thing for so many years –mostly in Span­ish– I’ve come to a point (matured?) where I just can’t go and put what­ever thought crosses my mind just to com­ply with some self-imposed post quota or because I think that’s expected of me. That’s absurd — I’d rather try to write out some­thing use­ful and of last­ing value, even if that takes me lots of R&D and not being able to “show signs of life” in days or even weeks. In the long run, it will be more sat­is­fy­ing for me.

That, and I really need to make myself an avatar here, dammit.

by beto on February 11, 2005 at 7:59 pm. Reply #

Yes you do, Alberto and you’re absolutely right. It’s best not to try to main­tain self quo­tas, espe­cially in my case when I can just barely make a deadline.

by kartooner on February 12, 2005 at 12:31 am. Reply #

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