Hacking the Good Days...
Blogs are great for asynchronous communications and documenting your streams of thoughts. But when everything is within a few clicks from search, your blogs are who you are to many. Recently I have been struggling to assess what I want to do with this blog. So i’ve done some research – what blogs are for to you guys?
1. A professional window to share your knowledge and join the conversation
Social Media Gurus like Jeremiah Owyang use blogs as his professional medium for outreach and aggregates information as well as shares knowledge. By opening up his blogs on various topics, he manages to attract a critical audience of the social media industry while also puts himself in the spot light among the social media practitioners.
To me it’s a bit like what Chris Rock says about relationship, ‘For the first three months, you are not you. You are a representative of you.’ Probably blogs are not an ideal medium to fully represent who you are (i.e. no drunk photos, please), but blogs are much better medium as the representation of one’s professional self. Great for networking, industrial visibility, connection with the like-minded.
2. A scrapbook on what you are reading and interested in
Christian Heilman (aka CodePo8, Yahoo! Developer Network‘s EU evangelist) sees blogs as a place where he tosses all the pieces he thinks of in one place where he may have to refer back to. Blogs to him are his scrapbook (and obviously the world is his playground). 
Umber lady geek DivineMissN (who dearly saves delicious bookmarks for me, literally thanks!) is definitely a queen in blog-cious-streaming. Whoops. Did I just create a new word?
3. A platform for you to keep in touch with people that works better with pull information rather than push
Remember those friends that call you at 11:30 pm and keep on rambling about how their lives are (completely disregard of whether you are busy or, dare to say, care or not)? Blogs are great medium to share what you are up to, especially for geeks on the go – you might not have the time or enough drives to call someone up and talk about BarCamp London and how it’d go – but once you blog about it, people who care will find you and will keep in the loop on what you do. And better yet – it only takes them 2′secs to leave you a comment, or track-back if they’re blogging anyway. Great for keeping in touch with people that you kinda care, but not enough to pick up the phone. (Note: I am not saying that calling someone or meeting someone for a coffee is bad – but there are friends that you do truly care while you just really want to know that they do well, and you are perfectly aware that they work 14 hours a day!). However, it seems that Facebook does serve very well for this purpose for the non-bloggers in this world… So does Twitter.
4. An alternative medium outside emails and phone that helps open communications and reduce correspondence volume
Luis Suarez, the star of IBM social software branch, is known for his say-no-to-email initiative that inspired my last blog post. Although I get mixed feedbacks from you guys, it is hard to refute the idea that we save time to build information on top of existing one, rather than to create information from scratch. Wikipedia is a good example. Documenting information about Hong Kong on Wikipedia is likely to benefit thousands of internet users, as opposed to those junior highschool projects where you start from scratch and only your parents and your teachers get to see what you’ve accomplished. Not to mention no one else can build on top of you brilliant work. Because of the hypertext-trackable nature of blogs, it is obviously a great medium for knowledge to be documented and grow on one and others while benefiting anyone who care enough to check out the strain of information.
5. A personal yet paradoxically open space for you to share emotions that you might not share with your mom, but in a form of poems with people you may never meet
Are you ready for this? I’m getting contentious, as usual. Blogs can be an environment similar to the Alcoholic Anonymous clubs – where you meet people that you never knew, but who are going through the same kind of issues at the same time as you do and would really love to hear about your emotions, experience and feedbacks, vice versa. A good use of blogs in this context is MacMillan‘s use of blogs for cancer patients and their family to share what they go through. Just like [hypothetically example, totally] your highschool best friend might take no interests in your stress in planning for a Bali holiday when she’s about to be sacked from her investment bank (and hence you go to tripadvisor instead of calling her), blogs become this paradoxically open space for people to share their most intimate reflections, thoughts, doubts and dreams.
Now, what is your blog? Probably this question is much easier to be answered in retrospect than when you set out to start a blog. For me (yup it’s all about me me me here, I’m sorry), I am stuck because my blog has always been my personal playground, scrapbooks, and thinking pads to share some very naunced reflections. But working in the social media industries, gathering all the insights and learnings, I feel bad not sharing those with a wider audience outside my firm.
You might ask, what’s stopping me? Well, being a keen observer on the sociology of collaboration, and as someone who is hyper risk adverse (which makes me a good social policy paranoid), I have, frankly, no appetitte for unfriendly strangers. Let me give you an example. Kathy Sierra, an amazing techkie lady who founded the Creating Passionate Users blog, attracted an amazing crowd of followers and supporters, and I was truly very inspired and concurred with her observations and learnt a lot from her. Sadly she stopped her blog at the peak if its development due to malicious personal threats. Why? In Chinese, we say that ‘Being at the peak also brings you frosty chills’. It’s great to have the attention of the people that think alike, who care about the future of technologies, pursuing our passions, being people closers. But we must not forget that there are those who are hurt, angry, and frustrated. The more prominent you are, the more likely you attract those attention as well.
All in all, I feel comfortable enough back to blogging now. And probably there is no point about pre-determining and risk-assessing everything you do. Or perhap there is? Don’t have the answers here. Thanks for bearing with this long post. Hope you have a great time blogging, sharing, and learning from one another.
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Cathy, Good and excellent analysis. Keen eye
Thanks for posting this.
I like the definition of blog as “the unedited voice of the author”, which is why its so important for a blog to be an authentic representation of real people. Corporations can’t blog, only individuals free of PR-filters can blog.
This is your living room, everyone is a guest in your home, so it’s all your rules, you get to define what you talk about and the sort of comments you accept.
Christian’s “scrap book” approach has a nice anti-patent sting, in that because blog posts are timestamped, it’s easier to prove prior-art on ideas that are patented these days.
The main rule I have in my blog is not to talk about work. Although I cannot separate work from non-work in the real world, I try to enforce it on my blog where I can. I also don’t talk about my real personal stuff, just maybe hint at the edges now and again. I hold that tightly close. And so the topic range is enough for it to remain largely impersonal. It’s still a mask, but one that I alone define.
Interesting feedback, M. But why not work-related content? Is it because it’s a tight rope between public and confidential information? Or it’s because it’s your living room and you do not want to ‘contaminate’ that with work stuff?
Thanks Jeremiah. You are really quick! *jaw drops* /impressed!
Yeah, sometimes its just to difficult to figure out when something is public knowledge or confidential. It’s just safer not to talk about work. That also avoids the PR shenanigans.
The other half of the problem is that no matter how clearly you disclaim that you do not represent your employer and opinions you share may not necessarily reflect those of your employer; sites like TechCrunch ignore that and take whatever you write as a standpoint of that employer. That’s happened with Dare Obasanjo recently, and it just isn’t right, nor conducive to a mutually enlightening conversation.
Unfortunately, the only way of avoiding that mire is not to blog, or to clearly not to talk about your employer / their interests. That’s why so many bloggers go dark when they join recognised organisations like Apple, Google, Yahoo – someone’s going to deliberately misconstrue things (both externally and internally to the employer).
Interesting take on blogging Cathy and @Isofaro. I feel (after 8 months of blogging) that I document experiences and what excites me in the remits of the world of web.
Twitter, Flickr and Facebook are great for the personal me, some somewhat targeted and fenced environments on the web where I have more context and constraints in which to express myself.
I don’t have any guilt in talking about my work life, or for that matter products and services that we (my present job) offer as it is such a big portion of my life — work.
Blogs are as you said it @Isofaro, the “voice of the author”, a human being behind the html, someone who is unique, who thinks, does, communicates different from every one else. We therefore, as bloggers, set our own publishing criteria which will inevitably detract some visitors the same as it may attract others.
Keep doing what works for you. You can’t please everyone but you can delight some.
Yup thanks for the insightful comments – All in all I don’t feel 100% comfortable talking about work stuff because it’s never easy to dance the tight rope between public and private corporate information.
Plus someone from techcruch left me a message on this blog! Haha shall I be afraid?
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