This blog has been a little quiet
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This blog has been uncharacteristically quiet over the last few months. In part, this was due to my writing energy being devoted to a book and plenty of articles. This has limited my ability to post “meaty” items, sharing thinking on key topics.
I would also normally be reposting links to interesting articles across a range of fields. What has been striking, however, is how little is getting published at the moment. Blogging has fallen off, online magazine articles are getting thin on the ground. That hasn’t left me much to repost!
Perhaps it’s due to the worsening economy, everyone is focusing on their next paycheque, leaving little time for writing. That would be a little odd, based on past experience. In the dot-com crash, plenty of experienced people found themselves on the street, with a need to do some serious marketing and profile raising.
During that bust, most of the current crop of usability, IA and KM books were written, and many online magazines launched. This greatly added to the knowledge freely available in the world, and defined the current crop of “gurus”.
So why isn’t the same thing happening now? Why is everyone so quiet? (We’re still publishing as normal, even picking up pace.)
Your thoughts?
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
6 Comments:
When one raises one’s profile online you will reach a plateau where the bulk of the community you have raised your profile with is just your peers and related communities. These may not be your clients. Hence your writing is for your peers.
Do your peers pay the bills, well often not. It is your clients that you need to influence to write more articles or market focused material that they will read.
Depending on your market your peers are not your clients.
So you step away from the time consuming writing to focus on expanding your client base and finding new markets or exploiting those that people have retracted from. We all only have 24 hrs in a day and often this does need to be focused on earning a dollar.
@Gary, that’s good insight! I agree that most writing tends to end up targeting peers rather than the uninitiated. The same also goes for conferences, which I think can be a big opportunity missed to bring more people “into the fold”…
James – I don’t perceive the total amount of writing to have dropped off. There’s more writing than ever. I think the roll of people doing it has changed – and probably for a mix of reasons:
- Those that have been writing/blogging for years tend to suffer from periods of fatigue or their attention is focused elsewhere.
- There is still a steady stream of old school thinkers/writers discovering blogging (e.g. Nancy Dixon).
- Newbies continually emerge. Mary Abraham, Ellen Di Resta & Stuart French are just 3 excellent bloggers who have been blogging for less than 2 years.
What I think is interesting is that the majority of this activity is not happening in trad journals, magazines or books. As important as these media remain, the action is elsewhere.
I agree with Matt,
@Matt, maybe I’m looking in the wrong places then!
Any recommendations on who in the blogging/writing world I should be following?
Well, the people mentioned in the above post are a good start.
I also rate Bob Sutton, Beth Kanter, Nancy White, Gav Heaton, Geoff Brown and Viv McWaters of late.
For sheer inventiveness in form, Marcus Brown probably tops the list.
But this all depends on taste.