Here I am, about 5 months into blogging in 2009, and I find myself unsatisfied with the frequency with which I update this blog. Sure, there is some content with which I am well pleased, but I just can't seem to understand why I can barely reach the 1 post-a-week goal I had set for myself back in January. What gives?
So, over the past 2 weeks I started to seriously think about the entire process I use to decide whether to blog about a subject or not, and I realized that I ask myself a number of questions whenever an idea for a blog post floats through my grey matter. The questions go something like this:
Has it been blogged already? If I google the subject, will I find the answer out there already? Am I contributing to the discussion in any way, or just adding to internet detritus?
Opinions are like.... Everyone's got an opinion. What makes mine so special? If I can't come up with an angle, I won't post it.
Would I want to read about that? If I were a follower of my own blog, would I want to read what I'd posted?
And I find that, while on any given day I can usually come up with 3 or 4 ideas that might make a passable blog post, most of them never make the cut because they can't make it through the preliminary examination questions. I'm not terribly satisfied by that result.
Yes, the internet is one giant data store, but even those of us with the greatest of google-fu know that it is sometimes very difficult to find an answer to a particular question. And, if you'd bear with my poetic license for a moment, data and information isn't just a reservoir we go to when we need something, it's the stuff we swim through. It's the conversation I had today with my wife about carbohydrates, it's the facebook message I got from an friend about a place we used to both work, it's the question someone asked on Twitter about SQL. And so, dealing with data is both a combination of looking for it, and it finding us when we least expect it. When I self-limit what I blog about, am I preventing data from finding someone?
So, as a warning to my kind readers, I think I'm going to experiment for a month by NOT asking myself those little questions about whether now is a time to blog, and see if that gets me to a happier blogging place. Pardon the dust.