It’s March 5th, 2009. I have been absent as a contributor to the SharePoint blogging world for a large number of months. Not double digits, mind you, but approaching. I have been an irregular blogger. That’s not the same as infrequent. At PointBridge we track our most frequent bloggers and post their names on our blog site. I was often in the top five and almost always in the top ten. Frequent doesn’t beat regular in the blogging world however. So over time my readership declined significantly. (Don’t I sound like the Editor-in-Chief of a newspaper or periodical ?)
Many of us use the turn of a new year to evaluate the past twelve months and resolve to change our habits in the coming year. I took some time this January to look back at my past blogs and after mentally wrestling with myself, concluded that I needed to change two characteristics of my blogs. The first I have already addressed, frequency.
The second and more difficult conclusion to make was that my blogs were too long. I have absolutely no empirical evidence to support me but I concluded that many potential readers found my blogs overly long. What’s the phrase, "If you can’t write your idea on the inside of a matchbook cover, you don’t have a clear idea."? Well in my own defense that doesn’t really apply — at least I don’t believe it does. Nonetheless today’s messages need to be succinct and compact. What that means is that a blog, as it’s meant to be, is not a natural genre for me. I prefer a piece which states a position, lays out some background and a defense of the central idea and spurs the reader to thought, if not action.
Blogging is different and for those in the early years of "gen boomer" requires a change in deeply rooted habits and ways of approaching the written exchange of ideas.
So what does all this mean? Two simple things. You can expect to see shorter and more frequent blogs appearing form me on the PointBridge blog site. If you missed it, my first blog in my new style was posted yesterday.
Why, you ask, if I thought about all of this in January did it take me until March to post? That’s a topic for another blog. I don’t want this one to become too lengthy now, do I?
