I’m starting to think that I was a better technology blogger before anyone knew of me. I’m not saying I’m all that well-known now, although someone did once call me a “minor Internet celebrity”–a title I have milked to death with my husband–but I’m known enough to get pitches by email. And I’m starting to see how this business works.
Now I get news a bit earlier than I used to, but I don’t necessarily have a more insightful reaction to it, especially if I try to jump onto that news as soon as I’m “allowed” to publish it. I see that my attention gets drawn to the same things that TechCrunch and Lifehacker and other RedMonk analysts follow. And it feels a bit dull to me. I feel a bit dull to myself.
I feel so dull that I can’t even gather up the links that would prove my point. But they are out there. Think of Zoho Notebook, the opening up of PDF, and the Yahoo! blog post on widgets that other people have been writing about. I heard of all these things by email, but I could just as well have found out about them from someone’s blog. This has something to do with recent discussions over PR too, but I’m too unsharp to draw the picture for you or even find the dots that you could connect together.
I miss the olden days, way back in December 2005, when I was all full of unknowing.
5 Comments
There’s a certain niceness to getting news ahead of time, but in some cases it’s not really needed. Indeed, it’s often somewhat counter-productive to be pre-briefed about something weeks ahead of time because by the time of the announcement, you get the effect you’re describing above: it doesn’t seem as thrilling as it did when you heard about it under embargo.
I think the other part of the “dull” that you have to watch out for is getting over-loaded with too much information and then not being able to give yourself time to (a.) narrow your thinking on a specific thing, or, (b.) thinking that you need to write a longer post on some topic when a nice short one would do. I struggle with that last one a lot.
There’s also a lot more “behind closed doors” stuff that goes on as an analyst for me now. I’ve only now begun to let that feed into my sense for how well or poorly I did on a given day. That is: in the past, I judged my performance based on good blog posts or consuming a lot of reading. Now, in addition to that, I judge my daily performance based on consulting that I do and boring admin stuff like dealing with meetings.
I mention that “performance” angle because, for me, that’s what makes me feel sharp or dull at the end of the day: how I answer the question, “did I do good work today?”
Aaaah - the perils of “minor” fame! I think Cote’ has a point (although I can’t tell if it applies to you, Anne) - MORE information isn’t necessarily BETTER information, nor are you as intrinsically interested in some things you see now as others. While you may have more material now, you are still better off commenting on those things YOU are interested in (and can therefore take some unique position on) than adding a ‘me-too’ comment on something that someone else covers better - that’s the point of focus, I guess.
I’m guessing there’s a period of adjusting to your new/extra sources of information while you sort out some of these issues. I’m fairly confident you’ll work it out … and I hadn’t really noticed any “dullness” anyway!
you may be feeling dull but the AJAX post frigging rocked!
Hey guys, I appreciate all your thoughts and they’re useful for thinking about my particular situation. I see a broader problem too, which I wrote about on my RedMonk blog.
Speaking of feeling like something was accomplished, I think Twitter’s pretty good for that. I usually send out a Twitter when I complete something, then I can go back and see what I actually accomplished even if there’s no public output.
Definitely more information is not always better, in many cases it’s worse, because of the opportunity cost. If I’m on a briefing for an hour about something that’s not all that important that’s one hour I didn’t spend looking at things that might have been important.
Do you feel like you have to break the news? Maybe feeling like you have to write about things you may not have choosen to write about otherwise is what’s making you feel dull. If you don’t have to break the news, just read it for fun and blog about the things that really excite you - like you used to.
I think you are doing a great job!
Stormy
4 Trackbacks
[…] Public relations, even in the blogging age, aims at closure. We see closure happening in technology blogging, when, like lemmings, B-list and C-list bloggers write posts linking to A-list bloggers… A-list bloggers whose agendas are set at least partially by what PR people want them to write about. […]
[…] Anne Zelenka, my amazing colleague at Web Worker Daily, has a post on her personal blog about the dullness of tech writing. Now I get news a bit earlier than I used to, but I don’t necessarily have a more insightful reaction to it, especially if I try to jump onto that news as soon as I’m “allowed” to publish it. I see that my attention gets drawn to the same things that TechCrunch and Lifehacker and other RedMonk analysts follow. And it feels a bit dull to me. I feel a bit dull to myself. […]
Why do we blog?
Miguel’s wistful. Anne’s feeling dull. Wesley’s introspective. Doug’s worried that some of his favorite bloggers are trying to compensate. This all serves to highlight the results from the education blogosphere survey that I did last month. We …
[…] I was surprised when I started my two new jobs last fall at Web Worker Daily and RedMonk how quickly I was flooded with redundant information in those two domains… and how dull that was. If you subscribe to a hundred or more feeds, you probably see the same information and ideas coming up again and again, just with slightly different twists. That’s because the Web 2.0 tech blogging community is a cluster unto itself. […]