A Day in Paradise

Greetings to everyone who still has this blog in their RSS feeds! I wanted to take a few minutes, while this beautiful Sunday evening winds to a close, to reflect over the years that I’ve been blogging.

I started my blog in 2003 when blogging was still fairly young. Back in the day I was consulting and had time on my hands & blogging was the best way for me to not just comment on the news that flew past me, but create an archive of all these random thoughts and technical commentary.

One of the blogs that influenced my style of blogging was Agonist.org – this blog flew to the forefront of the blogosphere (although I’m pretty sure that was before the term was coined) during the initial invasion of Iraq. As I read the agonist, I saw a change in the way blog authors interacted with their readers; Instead of providing a lot of commentary, the agonist was pulling specific pieces of news out of the news stream and posting them to the blog obsessively, providing an up-to-the-minute news feed from Iraq. Without the usual commentary, the “just the news” readers got what they wanted, and the discussion of the news was left up to the reader. Never before had I seen such lively and intelligent discussions.

I never had any big plans to turn my blogging into a “for profit venture” or become an A (or even B) level blogger. I simply enjoyed firing off lots of posts “agonist style”. Some days I was doing conference blogging, sometimes I was posting images, and then for a week straight I could have sworn I was a link blogger. But I had a blast!

Then life took over.

Since moving from consulting to full time “a real job” employment I’ve seen the time that I’ve been willing to to spend sitting behind a computer doing “my own stuff” slowly diminish until recently I’ve found that I have all but given up on my blogging.

To be fair, I do blog occasionally on our hedge fund blog at hedgeco.net, as well as spend a fair amount of time tweeting.

I’m not sure if twitter has replaced the need to sit down and spend 5-20 minutes creating a valuable blog entry, but more and more I am trying to find a link I posted on twitter and, thanks to twitter’s useless searching, have come up with nothing. The more I use twitter, the more difficult it gets to find anything I said using twitter.

Which brings me to this final realization: Even if nobody ever reads this blog, there is still a place for my Blogging.

Which leads to the obvious question: What am I going to do to get my blogging back on track?

• Focus on blogging: Bring people to my blog and create unique & useful content
• Build tools to consolidate my social networking footprint: My social footprint is a DISASTER – I am working on some tools which will turn my blog into a “portal” for all my social networking attention streams.
• Make goals: I’m going to be announcing a couple blogging goals in the next few weeks. Again, these will not be monetary goals, but I have gotten so out of the habit of blogging that unless I work pretty hard to get it going again its not going to happen.

Well, I guess we will see what happens with that!

Have a GREAT week!