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.
Outsource!
I'm sure there are people in India happy to blog for $1.73/hr.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Do what the slashdot editors do -- just use the same posts over and over with slightly different headlines.
No one realizes just how much work goes into any "hobby project website" until they start doing it themselves. Recently, I was elected into one position in a hobby association, dumped into the "webmaster" position, and also administer the forum software. Man, was it easy to be on the other side of the table when all I had to do was read what others posted. I had no idea how much work content, coding, and administrating is/was.
Then you have to deal w/the users of your website. Drama, questions, problems, bugs, whatever. Ugh.
I'm already burned out from that one particular project and I have my own website, other websites, and real life I have to deal with. I have gotten to the point where at least three days a week are "offline time". I sit down with a book and headphones or do something w/the wife or whatever.
I have talked about making your hobby your job and the problems that causes. Looks like other people are learning about it too.
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.
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.
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!
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.
About the same time they recognize the death of Apple -- uh, I mean BSD -- wait, the web -- OK, how about e-mail -- oh, nevermind.
"why do you call it football when there is no goddamn kicking in the game?"
You kick the ball when making a punt , attempting a field goal, starting the game or half by kicking off to the receiving team and after a touch down you kick the ball to score an extra point.
For more information about the game please visit http://www.wikipedia.org/ or visit this link.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
"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
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)