Managing the spiralling demands of blogging

It’s all about content. That’s the heart of the universe today. Which is why I blog – to have presence in the universe.

But writing a blog is a continuous commitment. You’re always trying to carve out time from seemingly intractably busy-ness, just to keep the blog alive. Blogging is a priority, but it’s always easy to postpone writing down an idea when it arises, and then it never gets done.

Of course, if you’re a professional blogger/ writer, then the demands are truly intense. Columbia Journalism Review writes how Michael Calderone, just leaving Politico to the Yahoo! News Project, wrote over 4,000 posts while at Politico (averaging over 4 posts for every single day of his 2 ½ years there).

I don’t know how professional bloggers who are parents of young children manage. You’d be torn in both directions. It’s hard to keep the blog posts flowing every day, all the time, while you have other demands.

However it will be an imperative for almost all of us to create content in some form, just to have any visibility at all in an overloaded world.

So those who choose to belong to the exclusive class of content creators are automatically drawn into this spiral of intensity, whether they like it or not.

As for myself, I think I’m going to change my blogging style a little, experiment a bit. Try to do shorter things. Capture thoughts as they come up. This may allow things to flow better while limiting time commitment. As in this post, putting up ideas half-baked, and the following post on the two types of people (might as well make it two posts!)

We are going to be launching a number of content sites over the next few months, so my writing will start to be spread over different spaces. We’ll be having fun experimenting with different forms of content creation and aggregation.