Why my blogging has sucked lately :)
I’ve been blogging less and less
As many of my readers may have noticed, I’ve been blogging less and less lately – it used to be multiple times a week, then it became once a week, and recently I’ve been blogging once every other week or so. I’m sure I can keep up that pace for quite a while, but it certainly makes for a less interesting blog :-)
Anyway, some of the reasons why I’ve slowed down in my blogging:
Blogging is more fun when you’re meeting people from lots of diverse companies and industries
When I was doing my Entrepreneur-in-Residence gig, I had an excuse to do lots and lots of meetings with people from across the digital media industry. On a single day, I might talk to companies in mobile, ad infrastructure, payments, social networking, games, and more. That was a great opportunity to blog because it’s easy to see connections and talk about ideas across industries. I don’t do this much anymore, so it’s harder to come up with these observations.
Getting deeper and narrower results in boring blog posts
Getting deeper and deeper in an area is a key part of the startup experience – you learn lots of weird things about your particular project, your particular target audience, and your specific industry. This doesn’t translate to great blog posts though, because most of what you learn there is completely inapplicable to other peoples’ situations. Instead, you get articles that are too “inside baseball” and esoteric.
Long blog posts are hard (and get harder over time)
Sometimes I really appreciate Twitter’s 140 character limit because it forces you to be short and sweet. A blog post, in particular my blogs, go the other direction. Over time, this has become a big pain in the ass since I’m not as comfortable posting one or two paragraph blog posts and instead go overboard with essays. I should probably just come up with a word limit and try to keep things down to a more reasonable size instead :-)
News-driven versus writing whatever
Another is getting inspired to write something – it’s a lot easier to write to comment on something in the news, versus just thinking about a particular topic and writing something great there. It’s always helpful to have some inspiration.
Potential changes?
From the above, it seems like a couple experiments might make sense. A big thing I should do is probably to write shorter things, and maybe do more news commentary. We’ll see if that helps at all :-)
Anyway, less excuses – back to blogging!
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