Welcome To Wednesday
Ahh... So I'm getting a bit centered again with my weblog. I went waaaay off to one side mobile news for a bit. Not only is that a hell of a lot of work (reading news, keeping track of interesting bits, remembering why it's interesting, copying the bits into the weblog and commenting. OOf.) but it's not as much fun as my normal free-form, off the top of my head way of writing here. And it's not as interesting to readers I think either.
I was thinking about it before I fell asleep last night (which says a lot about me, not all good ;-) ) and I think that what happens is that it's so easy to start "publishing" and lose the whole communication part of the weblog. This isn't a newsletter or a news site or a tips site. It's different. Every weblog post is like the first thought (or many times continuing thoughts) in a conversation with the people who read this site. It's always been in my mind a "public email" though sometimes I forget that. My user interface even says "subject" in the edit page and not "title" because that's how I see what I'm doing. I'm writing my thoughts to a bunch of pals.
Before I discovered Blogging, I used to get all this out of my system by joining newsgroups and starting eGroups/YahooGroups with my pals/coworkers/etc. I would then write just about as much as I write here and drive anyone those mailing lists nuts. It's nice that I get to get it all out in my own space that people can come to read as they choose. As long as I think of what I'm writing in the same way as posting to a newsgroup, it's great.
It's SOOO easy to get caught up in the publishing part of weblogging. The feeling that I NEED to produce something interesting today, instead of just writing what's on my mind. The paradoxical thing is that when I think like this, the quality of the writing goes down. I can tell because less people leave comments and less bloggers link to me. When I write off the cuff is when I get the most comments. Many times the stuff that attracts the MOST interest and comments is the stuff that's the shortest and completely unfiltered.
Anyways, I'm going back to blogging the stuff that interests me the most - development and opportunities to start my own gig.
Ahh, nice to get that off my mind.
-Russ