Geodog

Work is the curse of the blogging class

I suspect that historians looking back at the rise of blogging will see the tech depression of 2001-2004 as a critical factor in getting blogging started. The stage was set by the 1996-2001 internet boom where content had been hailed as king, and by Gore v. Bush and 9/11, which reminded people that politics really did matter. During the boom a lot of people had both been paid very well to write, and been introduced to rapidly changing technology for distributing writing, known as the internet. Writing about technology had been cool and lucrative, as had been creating technology for distributing words. When the bottom dropped out of the tech economy in 2001, it was still fun to write and create technology, and to read about others doing so, and lots of people had experience doing all three, there just wasn't any money in it. But what unemployed people don't have in the way of money, they make up for in time. And instead of working on macropublishing projects and technology, many of them started working on micropublishing projects, aka blogs. Many of the early bloggers and blogging tool creators were people who were unemployed, or, in the lexicon of the day, "consulting." If my own experience is any kind of guide, then I suspect that the tech depression had a lot to do with the rise of blogging. That's I had the time to try different blogging tools every month (at one point I was simultaneously maintaining blogs on Radio, pMachine, Blogger, and Movable Type), to keep track of and sign up for the betas of all the new adjunct services like blogrolling, technorati and blogsnow, and to restyle my blogs to follow the latest web fads. That's when I had time to hunt out interesting conferences and finagle ways to go to them. That's when I had time to try to write 1,000 words a day. There has been a fair bit of discussion recently about how many of the blogging pioneers, even those who are trying to make their living creating blogging tools and services, just don't write much any more. I know that I don't write nearly as much as the 1,000 words a night that I set myself as a goal in 2002 and 2003. There are lots of reasons this is true, but the primary one is can be summed up in one word, Work.

Unlike the dark days of the post-bubble crash, when I first presided over a software development company looking for a second round of funding to launch a product after the crash, then ran a software consulting company that had no customers, then scrounged a living doing odd consulting jobs as I looked for the next interesting thing and educated myself on new developments in technology, I now have a real job. I have somewhere that I have to be 8 to 12 hours a day, and I spend all day going to meetings and writing emails, proposals, plans and schedules. Unlike some other bloggers, my job is primarily inward facing. I'm not paid to promote my company's viewpoint or products. I work on things that my company isn't ready to make public yet. And while I have my disagreements with some of the things we are doing, as one does in every job, I like my company and its products, and I find it much more productive to discuss my disagreements with the CEO or the person responsible than to blog about them. That's one of the advantages of working at a startup, you can go to the source to work out problems. But that means that writing during work, or about work, is out.

That leaves after work. While I work a fairly typical startup schedule, having a family life is very important to me as well, so I try to be home for family dinner most nights, and work in my home office after putting the family to bed. By the time I catch up with the day's work email, it is usually 10 or 11 pm, then I spend an hour reading the news and the blogs. Then the choice comes, sleep or write? Usually I try to choose sleep, because shorting my sleep shorts my family and my work, but occasionally I give in and indulge myself with writing, usually on the weekends. But I can't afford to do that often. That means not much gets written any more, and I am much more likely to post a del.icio.us link than I am to write the kind of long essay I like to write.

If my experience is at all typical, it might go part way to explain to rise of corporate blogging (if I had $1K for every question I have answered about corporate blogging over the last year, I wouldn't have to work for a living -- who knew?), the decline of the general interest, unsponsored blog, and the black hole that the blogging pioneers have fallen into. As with any medium, now that blogging is big, commercial interests are wading into the mix, embracing and extending, both enabling more people to make a living writing, but also changing what gets written about. And fewer people have the luxury of time to write as a hobby. While on the whole I think the internet is a much richer place than it was 5 years ago, in part due to the work of the blogging pioneers, and I love seeing so many people writing, it is also a poorer place as well. Personally, I have to say, while I really like getting a paycheck again, and I like my job my job a lot, I also miss writing for a wide audience every day. Work is the curse of the blogging class.