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Columnist Turned Accidental Baseball Blogger
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Wall Street Journal Online tech columnist Jason Fry started playing around with a New York Mets blog almost a year ago. In today's Real Time column, he outs himself as one of the writers behind Faith & Fear in Flushing, and writes about the stress of blogging: "The downside of being a blog writer? Being a blog administrator. I also wasn't prepared for how much work blogging was. Baseball already took up three hours a night; now it took up four -- at least. Blogging about a thrilling extra-inning win was easy; blogging about a dull-as-dishwater loss wasn't. And with more and more people reading us and commenting about our posts, blogging sometimes became a duty; we wrote at least one new entry for 190 straight days, including ones when one or both of us was tired, on vacation or not particularly inspired."" Heh. Boy, does this refrain ever sound familiar.
And with more and more people reading us and commenting about our posts, blogging sometimes became a duty;
Only in your own friggin' heads.
I have a blog that's fairly popular (not the link here and I'm not posting it). Sometimes, if I go a while without posting, I get comments, some quite nasty, asking why (or just complaining that) I haven't posted recently.
My thought is, "Pay my rent and then we can talk about my responsibility to write this damn thing." I write when I'm in the mood and I don't write when I'm not in the mood. If people can't deal with that for free, then they can go find another blog.
Any responsibility these guys feel to doing this daily is of their own making. If they're not getting paid for doing it when they don't want to do it, then they're morons. If they ARE getting paid, then they need to stop whining.
wrote at least one new entry for 190 straight days, including ones when one or both of us was tired, on vacation or not particularly inspired.
*whiners*
I guess this goes to show people will read anything reguardless of the quality of content. Hell, your reading this.....
Am no fek Buddhist, but this is enlightenment.
Blogging is hard? Compared to what? Watching TV? Digging ditches, cleaning septic tanks, plumbing, and about a million other jobs are much harder than merely posting trivial and useless opinions on fluff topics.
Get real.
Keeping that stream of blog posts coming is a lot harder than most people think before they actually try it.
In that, blogging is no different than any other kind of content creation. Especially non-profit content creation.
What makes the difficulty surprising, I think, is how many people don't seem to have it. You look around in blogville and see all these people posting at least once a day, and a lot of them have large readerships. But if you look closely you find that a lot of these folks are doing one or more of:
If none of those apply to you, that leaves the not-so-simple task of regularly trying to write something interesting and suitable for at least amateur publication. Anyone who ever made a zine or a comic will tell you it's a very hard habit to get into. But with blogging, you have the hyper-productive blogs in front of you, and the blog companies telling you how easy it is, and you dive in expecting it to be cake.
And then there's the whole templates-and-hacking issue, at least if you don't want the blog to be ugly. Yep, lotsa work.
This Like That - fun with words!
Professional columnists and cartoonists sometimes prepare a few submissions ahead of time. Thought-pieces, retrospectives, discussion of long-term trends, etc. don't depend as much on timely, up-to-the-minute news. If nothing timely inspires an entry or exhaustion strikes, then post one from inventory.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Then get paid for it.
If you want to blog for the fun of it, don't take it so seriously. If you miss a day that's just too bad. If you regret missing a day, that's fine.
If I'm on vacation and miss blogging for a few days to a week or two, too bad. And if people complain, let them pay me to do it daily.
No one realizes just how much work goes into any "hobby project website" until they start doing it themselves.
Actually, I've found just the opposite to be true. I started a "hobby" site about 2 years ago dealing with home remedies (My Home Remedies). There is some initial work coding the site, but after that, assuming there are no huge bugs, it takes maybe 5 minutes a day for me to review submissions. Of course, the key to an easy, successful hobby site, unless you just love the sound of your fingers clicking on the keyboard, is to get the users to write the content for you.
Further, this hobby site now makes me an extra grand or so a month (and it continues to increase). I've been so impressed with how easy it is once the initial time investment is over that I've taken it up a level and created a new site (Bloomshare) where other people can create their own communities similar to the home remedies site but on any topic they like. They can write content if they want, or they can let their visitors write it for them. Plus they can put ads on their sites and get paid just like me!
Most serious webmasters know the phrase "Content is King." The real key is to have your visitors create the content for you, which, surprisingly enough, they are more than willing to do.
(And, of course, baseball is played in many other countries, even if the MLB doesn't have teams in them.)
"we wrote at least one new entry for 190 straight days, including ones when one or both of us was tired, on vacation or not particularly inspired."
Heh. Boy, does this refrain ever sound familiar.
Oh yeah, sure. With the exception of Taco's diatribe against Blizzard last week, how much content do Slashdot editors* write in a week? Maybe 50 words?
* for all values of editors = submission moderators
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