For one who generally publishes multiple times a day, going nearly two weeks without a post is odd. Do bloggers fade away into social media and microblogging sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Posterous? It would be easy to draw that conclusion as many "bloggers" do give up and move to these other mediums. Content creation is challenging, particularly if you stop practicing. Like anything, the more you practice, the easier writing becomes. I am out of practice. Just writing these first few sentences, I’ve had to make some cereal, discuss Pink Panther’s muscles, let the dogs in after having a discussion with a child about why they didn’t need to go out in the first place, and read several Chris Brogan posts in looking for the practice link above. Environment certainly plays into the ability to produce quality content which returns me to the question above. I usually work remotely from my basement office which allows me to take blogging breaks; I don’t smoke and blogging is healthier. I make a policy to avoid blogging from a client site and that’s the crux of my blogging absence. For the first time, in nearly a decade, I’m on a contract which requires my presence at a client’s office.
Where does this put me? I have been enjoying Qik, and Audioboo because I can safely use these services on the drive to the client’s office. I’m a long time user of Twitter and continue to Tweet several times a day. Despite my early disdain for Facebook, I put a lot of brief content on Facebook and use it a bit like an aggregator (see also). Soon, Reality Me is going to be redesigned to aggregate more of these third party services.
Wait! I thought you hated 3rd party services! I have preached over the years that you should own your content. Despite that, I started my blogging on Blogger.com. As a result, I almost lost an enormous amount of writing a research when Blogger decided to simply disable my account. In those early days, I also used Haloscan for comments. Haloscan recently shutdown due to hardware failures that made continuing the service prohibitive. I don’t hate these third party services. Using them comes with risks such as loss of ownership of content, or loss of content altogether. Maybe the third party decides to use your works with their own creative changes; the terms of service may permit that…you read the TOS right? The caveat is that the barrier for entry to using these services is so low that content creation is fun and almost like a game. The positive side of using these services is that they act like free or inexpensive CDNs and bear the brunt of the load when you find yourself on the front page of Digg. Be sure to backup the content you want to own.
Why aren’t you blogging when you get home? My evenings have been consumed with family duties, paper work and client support. This is the time of year that I spend evenings rechartering the scout troop, filing taxes, filling out various long forms to support my work, etc. I have so much due at the same time around this time of year that my head is so cluttered that even with Jott (affiliate link) chiming off reminders, I feel like I’m letting some things slip through the cracks. Fortunately, I believe this weekend my plate clears and then I can begin to fill it again.
