Slashdot Mirror
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.
Just write when you feel like you should. Write only when it means something to you. Don't try to write for the sake of an audience. If you get bored with it, do something else. Or write about different things. Baseball audience doesn't want to hear about your views on music or politics or curling? Well too bad for them!
posting trivial and useless opinions on fluff topics
Like dismissing an entire medium* on Slashdot? That takes a lot of work, doesn't it?
Sure, those jobs are a lot more physically difficult (with the exception of watching TV). But anyone who spends time programming, writing websites -- heck, just writing -- should recognize that mental work takes effort too. And yes, there are a lot of "fluff" blogs -- probably the majority, though that just reflects Sturgeon's Law.
Posting fluff is easy. Keeping a schedule, or trying to write something more than "OMG my team won/lost/tied!" takes time and effort, no matter what the topic.
*IMO, "blogs" are simply a subset of the web, and the label has more to do with the structure and management tools than the actual content. So I don't consider blogs to be any more or less important than the rest of the web.
I've found that running my site on Debian Administration a fair amount of work.
Choosing the base software was fairly simple, but since then I find I'm making tweaks to the code on an almost daily basis. Sometimes these are just minor things, othertimes I have to make a lot of changes for different reasons.
(Of course switching to a CSS layout to be all cool like /. doesn't help that ;)
Even if you allow users to submit content, as I do, there's still a lot of writing I've had to do. With a couple of thousand registered users and a lot more anonymous repeat visitors I still find that only around 1% of users will ever contribute anything.
Most people seem more interested in reading than supplying content - and I find it unlikely this will ever change significantly.
In terms of income I get virtually nothing, personally, the Google Adsense subsidises the site's hosting costs - but doesn't cover it 100%. Still it is a hobby, and it is a useful site for a particular audience so I'll keep it going as long as I can..
Yeah, but my hobby site was more relaxing/fun when it *didn't* pay the rent.
Now it's bringing in enough money to do that, and I feel obligated to clean up the bugs, be vigilant about spam, redesign the site to something modern, getting upset when artists don't deliver...
Now it's work.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.